“People with good grades: what are your study habits?”

people with good grades what are your study habits I'm currently in my third year of uni in a pre-made program I've definitely struggled though but of goals of going to Mid school I was hoping this year I would finally achieve higher grades as I've been putting a lot more effort in however I am still yielding the same results average my GPA is terrible and I continuously get mid 60s I won't lie as a semester has gone on I keep getting these marks I've have pretty much given up I feel like that's all I am an

average student there's nothing wrong with that I just need a high average to even be looked at by a mid school I feel like I know the content for whatever test well I write it and do either terrible or average I think I just struggle with testing as I usually can teach the content to someone else here are my current study habits uh pre-lecture review before class review content about 30 to an hour after class not to later TR previous content tackle whatever else I need to I also try to teach the con to my

family I also ask chat gbd to make mock tests I do all of this consistently and still get 60s I've tried changing the amount of time I spend on each course the technique and study approach but nothing has worked it's really discouraging and I feel like I may never achieve a single 80% or higher in my uni degree please provide any advice or tips that have worked for you or others well uh independent pickle I completely understand what that feels like cuz I was an exactly the same boat feeling like you're trying as hard as

you can putting in effort in and getting average results when I first entered into medical school and I realized how much harder it was getting through Medical School than just getting into medical school just cu the workload I was I felt like this is impossible like there's clearly a part of the equation that I was missing and so I think for you uh coming into that the first thing that I'll just say is that there's a lot of good things that I'm seeing with what you have said here's what I'm here's what I'm noticing is

that first of all you're asking for help like you openminded and willing to get help it means you're putting yourself in a position where you're giving yourself a chance to succeed and I think lot of people don't put themselves in this position they don't ask for help and so just the fact that you're asking and posting and being honest and transparent about it I think it I can see why you're such an independent pickle um this is a really good sign the other thing that I'm seeing is that you're putting in enough effort right the

effort part of the equation is not the issue right so if we if we think about um effort uh and success as success equals effort times process then the effort part is checked off the only part we we can focus purely on the process because we know that you're studying enough and for most people I would say that if you're studying more than 5 hours a day you're already starting to get to the point where just more effort and more time is going to be diminishing in your returns um if you're not studying very much

like you're only studying a few hours a day and as your methods and processes are already really really refined you're probably going to be able to get pretty good value just by spending more time studying but if you're already studying 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 hours a day um more effort is probably not where it's worth spending that extra available time on improving it's going to be on focusing on the process and speaking of your process uh you've actually outlined what your current study habit and this is really useful and so what I'm

going to do now is I'm actually going to map out what your study process is and I'm going to point out the areas where I think will be probably the most highed areas for you to focus on based on my experience having not only overcome this challenge myself but in teaching thousands of other people in almost exactly the same situation to overcome this and it does take some time but if you focus on on these things I'm confident that you will be able to make it through so the first thing that you've said here is

that you are uh doing a pre-lecture review before class so we're going to put the lecture in the middle as your main learning event and then before this we have a pre-study that you're doing um and you are doing this uh it doesn't say what you're doing it just says study and then after the lecture about 30 minutes to 1 hour after your lecture you are going to review the content again so this is your first review uh I try to receive previous days content and then tack on whatever else I need to so I'm

also doing space repetition I also try to teach the concepts to my family to apply active recall I also asked chat B to make mock tests based on my notes and the course content similar to what I'd see on a test so there isn't really a chronology that's really clear here in terms of when that's happening um I sort of doubt you're doing that all on the exact same day as you're doing your lecture review um so at some point after this first review let's at some point after we're doing other reviews uh and these

are composed of teaching to family and doing mock tests using chat BT um and just trying to accumulate your previous uh content during your study session so that you can try to do some space repetition so overall I'm going to say that you have an a template that is can be very successful but there are a few things that immediately stick out to me as high yield areas where I think that there could be changes that are made first of all the idea of teaching and doing mock tests and also cumulating to try to get

that space repetition these are all great strategies to use I would encourage you to keep doing that um I'm always talking about it's not enough to just use a technique you also need to know why a technique works so I'll just briefly explain that the teaching is really good because it's activating a generation effect in that it's forcing your brain to generate new knowledge based on the knowledge that you have it is also a multi-order technique multi-order meaning that it's testing at different levels of knowledge so you're testing in like the small facts and the

details but it also forces you to think about how you're going to package and organize the material when you're teaching it to someone um and that organization process requires you to evaluate and think about the material in relation to itself it creates a network and so that's a higher r um strategy so teaching is for that reason usually a very good one uh the mock testing this is great because again it it tends to be multi-order especially if chat GPT is generating it it's usually pretty good at generating these like multi-order questions um and also

this is a a great way of doing your active recall as is the teaching um and it's also going to help you to do more targeted Gap finding as opposed to teaching where you might have to sort of teach the entire topic for you know 15 20 minutes before you realize oh here's a gap in my knowledge with testing it's it allows you to do that a little bit more quickly and in a more targeted way so this is all very good um having revision and retrieval strategies that incorporate all of these different elements is

a good strategy to be using here are the things that I see that I think you should focus on the the first part that really sticks out to me is this area here specifically the lack of information in this part in the pre-study you've sort of just said a pre-lecture review uh and in the lecture itself there is no information and even when you're reviewing it afterwards there's no real information about what you're actually doing so again if we're going back to that equation of successor effort times process either you have not told me much

about your process or you're not very aware of the process you're using and I think probably given the amount of detail you've given the other things it's probably that you're not aware of the process as deeply as you should be if I think about pre-study or or just any type of study imagine someone who's sitting there um who's uh you know listening to a lecture while they're vacuuming their house and then uh at the same time having a conversation with their flatmate and with their favorite music on in the background imagine that versus someone who's

sitting there at their desk focused with their books out with their lectures material out you know writing their notes and then imagine that compared to someone who is looking through their lecture material specifically looking for the areas that they think are the most important um thinking about how the most important things are related to each other building a general understanding of the topic and strategically going and searching for specific terminology and keywords that they think they're going to struggle with during the lecture and consolidating those points when you think about those different types of activities

what becomes very clear is that what you're doing in the time makes a very big difference to how good your memory is going to be at the end of it and how effective that process was so the fact that you are doing pre-study is actually really really good this is something that a lot of people don't do at all so if you're going from not doing any pre-study to just doing some form of pre-study there's a immediate benefit that you can reap from just doing that but from the point of doing it to doing it

well there's a big spectrum and so I suspect that just based on the fact that you haven't given any more detail it's an area that you probably haven't thought about as much as you should and ideally anytime you create a learning system you want it to build on itself I often say think about learning like creating a sculpture uh you start with a big just rough cut block of wood and then in your first pass of wood you're not creating like a a perfect you know statue you're just creating a general outline you're just chipping

away these Big Blocks until you get a rough kind of shape that you know you're kind of happy to work with and then after you do that you go back on it and then you start adding a little bit more detail to it and so the the sculpture kind of develops in these kind of passes with each pass getting more and more and more detailed and more and more refined but the key here is that as you keep building you're working with the same slab of stone you're not like chipping away at one stone one

day and then the next day just getting like a whole new slab of stone and then just working on that and then the next day now you're like doing some pottery and then the next day you're like you painting on a canvas you're working on the same thing and so all the time you spend on it is continuing to refine this product further and further and further and that's the key whenever we are doing any study we want in our pre-study to get the basic shape and the basic outline of what we're looking at and

however you do that the product of the pre-study we want that to feed directly into so let's say for example because I I often teach this a technique that we're going to create a basic mind map okay of of the of the main ideas very very simple and you can do this in 15 to 20 minutes just going through picking up the main ideas thinking about how they connected together try to make it make sense for you at a big picture level without focusing on too much of the details when you do that you take

that into the lecture and that becomes the current level that you're building off of so again in the lecture your objective is not to get to 100% that's not realistic at least not for most people the next step is to get a little bit more detail on there carve out that shape with a little bit more Fidelity and so that map that you brought in starts becoming a little bit more fleshed out right we add a few more subconcepts we add a little bit more detail we you know realize that this connection is actually wrong

and actually maybe it should be like this instead um you know and this this map it it grows quite organically and probably by the end of the lecture you've got lots of ideas and it's it's looking rather messy which means that now you've got a great setup for your post lecture first review because from your review You've got lots of things to clean up and you've got lots of little other ideas that you didn't know how to add to your current map to your current sculpure that you can now spend some time to add on

to and so during this review period we're cleaning it up we're adding more detail we're spending time going through the textbook we're taking our time to understand some things that we didn't understand before we're correcting some relationships that we got wrong before you know we're we're giving us the space to correct ourselves to evaluate what we've got and to add on more information and when we do it in this way there's two main things that this achieves number one is that when we do this it automatically is more time efficient because the time we're spending

on building knowledge Builds on itself we're starting at level one and then we're taking it to level two and then we're taking it to level three as opposed to studying and reviewing content in one way and then in the lecture thinking about it in a totally different way and then afterwards reviewing it in a different way and then testing ourselves in a different way constantly We're Never Letting our knowledge really build up at least not systematically and that's usually the reason why uh a lot of people will feel like they only really get the topic

and it only really clicks to them like just before the exam when they've done heaps of this uh reviewing like testing and testing and testing because that's the thing that builds on itself and because you've tested yourself so many times you've allowed the knowledge to actually build for the first time and it makes you wonder like well what's the point of even going to the lectures why not just Spam through practice questions and for a lot of people you could just do that it's just as effective as your other method of studying and all the

notes that you write and everything that you did did beforehand kind of becomes a waste of time and that's actually true it is a waste of time if you're not making it build on itself whereas if you do this not only is it building but because we're thinking in networks which is the way that our brain likes to operate it automatically also improves our memory and it increases the depth of our knowledge which means that at the end of all of the studying we actually just naturally retain more so not only does it mean that

obviously our memory is better but we're even wasting less time later on relearning the stuff that we forgot and just imagine if 80 to 90% of what you learned the first time you learn it you just remembered that for like 3 4 weeks imagine how much time you would save from not having to just relearn the stuff you forgot 3 4 days ago and that 80 to 90% retention these are real numbers like the real students filling in the surveys on my program they are saying that their retention after just you know one two weeks

studying at one time is 80 90 95 % and it's possible and your brain is capable of doing that but only if you put it in a position where it can do that and that's all about thinking in these relationships and building that big picture understanding and working in this way where it's just sequentially getting more and more detailed which stops your brain from getting overwhelmed because as soon as your brain gets just too overwhelmed things are going to start slipping but by building on it in this way we reduce that overwhelm and it allows

your brain to hold on that information much more solidly so overall Mr independent pickle I think the area probably that if you were to spend some time to get better at that I am like very very confident that this would help you is number one creating a system where what you do in your pre-study is building into your lecture and then it's building into your post review and then number two making sure that when you're thinking about the information from the very beginning but all the way through you're trying to think about it in networks

in a big picture sense connecting ideas together rather than focusing on things in isolation and if you do that on top of what you're already doing with your teaching and your mock tests and cumulating stuff and reviewing it to do the space repetition I think you'll find that it's much easier to cover that volume and that your your retention and your depth of understanding just becomes much deeper and more intuitive and if right now you're getting mid 60s with a method that you're currently using just making this change should be enough to get you into

the 80s so hopefully that helped if there's a question that you want me to answer then leave a question in the comments below and if you want to learn a little bit more about other techniques that you can apply or how you can do your pre-study better or what to do during the lectures or how to make learning build on itself in a complete Learning System then check out this other video recommended for you right here