The Best Study Techniques for Exams (Backed by How Memory Works)

The most popular study methods — re-reading notes and highlighting — are also among the least effective. They feel productive because the material becomes familiar, but familiarity isn't the same as memory. When the exam asks you to retrieve an idea from a blank page, recognising it in your notes won't help. The techniques that actually work are the ones that feel harder while you do them.

The single highest-leverage change you can make is to close the book and try to recall the material from memory — flashcards, practice questions, or just writing down everything you remember about a topic. This "retrieval practice" strengthens the pathways you'll actually use in the exam, and the struggle to recall is the point, not a sign you're doing it wrong. Every time you pull an answer out of your own head, you make it easier to pull out next time.

Cramming loads information into short-term memory that leaks away within days. Spreading the same total study time across several sessions — a bit today, a bit in two days, a bit next week — forces your brain to reconstruct the material each time, which builds far more durable memory. Start early and revisit, rather than marathon the night before.

Most people revise in blocks — all the projectile-motion questions together, then all the circuits questions. It feels orderly and it produces good practice-session performance, but it quietly does half the job. When every question in front of you is the same type, you never have to work out which method applies, and choosing the method is most of what an exam actually tests. Mixing problem types within a session, so you have to identify the approach each time, feels noticeably worse while you do it and produces better results when it counts. That gap between how a technique feels and how well it works is the recurring theme of this entire subject.

Once you can recall a fact, the next step is connecting it to things you already know. Ask why it is true, how it relates to the topic before it, what would change if one condition were different, and where it contradicts your intuition. Explaining a concept out loud in plain language — as if teaching someone who has not taken the course — exposes the places where you have memorised a phrase without understanding the mechanism. Those gaps are invisible while you re-read and obvious the moment you try to explain.

Past papers are the closest thing to the real test, and they get wasted when they are treated as another reading exercise. Do them closed-book, to time, in one sitting, before you look at the mark scheme — the discomfort of not knowing is exactly the condition you are training for. Timed practice also teaches pacing, which is a genuinely separate skill from knowing the material and accounts for a lot of otherwise unexplained lost marks. Afterwards, spend as long on the review as on the paper: for every mark dropped, work out whether it was a knowledge gap, a misread question, or time pressure, because those three have completely different fixes.

Cut re-reading, highlighting, and copying notes out neatly. All three are fluent, comfortable, and produce a strong feeling of familiarity that is easily mistaken for knowing. Rewriting notes in particular can absorb entire evenings while asking almost nothing of your memory. If you want to keep one of them, use highlighting only as a first pass to mark what you will later test yourself on — never as the studying itself.

Good techniques still need focused time to run in. A study timer keeps sessions bounded and honest: one topic, one focused block, a short break, repeat. The structure makes long revision days sustainable and makes starting easier when the exam still feels far away. Pair timed blocks with retrieval practice — recall a topic during the block, rest during the break — and you're using two of the most evidence-backed tools at once. Problem sets suit the classic 25-minute block; dense reading usually wants longer.

A workable pattern looks like this. Each day, run two or three focused blocks. Start each one by recalling the previous session's topic from memory for a few minutes before opening anything — that is your spacing and your retrieval practice in the same move. Spend the body of the block on mixed practice questions rather than reading. End the week with one past paper done to time, followed by a proper review of every dropped mark. It is less comfortable than an evening of highlighting, and it is the reason it works.