so let's start with the easiest type of test to get good at multiple choice standardized tests that means tests like the SAT act G je GMAT MCAT the bar CFA CPA cat pset upsc gcses and pretty much every three to fourl acronym except of course for the back France's national university entrance exam which is unfortunately pretty much all written essay questions but I'm guessing the French students actually like that cuz if they don't know the answer to a question at least they can cut out the blank white free response box and wave it in the
air but for the rest of us we will get multiple choice questions so here's a tip that works especially well for Math and I got it from this YouTube video called this will make you better at math tests but you probably are not doing it I went into this expecting the usual tips that you find on the internet study get a good night's sleep eat a healthy breakfast arrive early drink water relax take your time check your work you know the type of advice you Googled the night before the test when you ran out of
motivation to actually study but I clicked on the video and the advice was actually something I'd never heard anywhere else speed will make you better at math you need to be able to do problems fast okay it's important okay so after you've studied and done everything you can do for your class you want to work on speed you want to work on like doing problems quickly and correctly so not only do speed let you finish the test it lets you redo the test that's right you finish the test and then you do it again not
look it over you just do it again and then you compare your answers right there's a difference between looking over your work and redoing your work harder to find mistakes if you're just looking at your work but when you're redoing your work you're less likely to make the same mistake and at the time it made little sense yeah I get why would help to be able to go through a math test fast but I also thought speed was the same thing as rushing and everyone knows you shouldn't rush during a test so I didn't think
much of it until I remembered another video and it was a video of this one guy recording himself doing the entire SAT Math no calculator test without knowing the questions beforehand in 5 minutes watching him flip the page before I've even read the first problem is like the SAT equivalent of watching a chess grandmas pre-move an entire game the difference here is that while this is almost impossible for the average person this is actually pretty achievable and anyone can do it you don't have to rush speed just means using more efficient techniques to get to
the answer for example let's try a problem here the answer looks maybe not that obvious for all real numbers x 78 + 10 /x equal what now the way you're supposed to do it is to do this cross multiplying thing where you multiply the bottoms then you multiply AC cross like this then you add the terms together so here it would be 7 x + 80 over 8X so D is the answer but what if you didn't know that well you don't have to stare at the problem and you don't have to waste your precious
time you could just plug in numbers if x equals 1 this would give you 87 over 8 then plug in xal 1 into all the answer choices you'll find that D is the only one that matches so the answer has to be D another trick that can help you go faster is knowing how to spot common mistake answers these are answers that the average student would get if they didn't know how to do the problem and therefore decided to reinvent the laws of math for for example adding two fractions by adding the top and bottom
adding two fractions by multiplying the top and bottom adding two fractions by adding the top and multiplying the bottom and lastly adding two fractions by multiplying across the fraction bar itself and then adding the bottom of course it's not the test writer's fault they're not trying to make you fail they're probably just working in a government sweat shop getting paid by the question and this is the fastest way for them to make up the answer choices and get to go home so take advantage of that if you're a good test taker then even if you
don't have time to do the problem or time to do the shortcut or even the time to plug in the answer choices you can at least eliminate the ones that look like common mistakes just cross them out and then from there you can make a 50/50 guess but I'm going to be honest if you want to get even faster at doing problems you're probably going to have to practice doing more problems of course that's very easy to say it can be pretty boring to do practice tests and sometimes you lose focus and end up taking
a full hour rereading the same question over and over again and this is actually why I think it's not a terrible idea to just go on YouTube and just watch other people do practice problems just search up the name of the test you're taking and then walk through and then you'll find people explaining a bunch of problems step by step ideally you would do practice problems yourself but let's be real this takes much less energy this is a lot faster and instead of you having to do a full practice test start to finish you can
get exposed to more problems and more solutions in a quicker and shorter format wait shorter format short form short form today's sponsor it's an app that takes thousands of all the best non-fiction books you've ever wanted to read and condenses them into full guides I've been using it since May and even though it's not a replacement for books it lets me learn the ideas from way more books than it otherwise would have like for example everyone always says to read the book influen by Robert Chini but normally the fact that I have to firmly decide
on that being the one monthly book I read plus the fact that I have to acquire the book and then I have to find the time to read it all that creates too much friction but if you have short form it's just one click and now you're in one book two more clicks and now you're in a different book plus it has dark mode I use it both on desktop and on mobile it has all of these categories and on top of that they add new books every week plus if you sign up through the
link short.com actually you get a 5-day free trial plus a 20% discount off the annual subscription it's going to be the first link down below if you want to claim that discount and free trial so if that sounds interesting to you try it out anyway back to my favorite lazy study technique which is simply just watching other people on YouTube do practice problems when the test comes around you might be surprised just how much knowledge you absorbed from the videos and yes of course it's better to actively do the problems yourself but if you find
that you cannot focus at all then I think it'd be better for most of us to spend 2 hours watching 45 practice problems get solved than to spend 1 hour on a single practice problem and then go take a nap besides YouTube is great for learning shortcuts and strategies like this video teaches you how to solve a seemingly hard integral problem in just 20 seconds this video shows you a problem that would usually take 5 minutes but it gives you a formula to do it in 5 seconds so just go on YouTube and search up
shortcuts or strategies or tricks for whatever test you're taking you might learn some stuff that you won't find in regular textbooks or test prep guides here's one of the best ones I've ever learned from YouTube and it works every time you have to read a passage and answer questions like on the SAT act GRE LSAT and MCAT usually the people who write the test also create the answer key at the same time with concrete explanations for why each wrong answer is unarguably wrong and why each right answer is unarguably right and the explanations usually need
to be based on either facts or evidence from the passage they can't can't be based on opinion so when you're taking the test and you're stuck between Choice a and choice B try to imagine you wrote the answer key if a is wrong there would need to be a factual explanation why it's wrong and there would also need to be a strong explanation why B is Right based on evidence from the passage so try and decide which answer would have the strongest explanation this mental shift will help you get a lot more points because it
gets you to think like the person who made the test but until this point I've ignored the one crucial factor in how you do want on any type of test studying so here are my best study tips to make studying easy number one avoid analysis paralysis a big barrier to studying is just wasting time thinking about what to study or how you're going to study it's good to have a plan but at some point you need to actually execute the plan so just pick whatever methods worked for you in the past and do that or
if nothing is working try the classic method reading textbooks and doing practice problems it might be boring but it works number two have an emergency fund the one major threat to most people's academic performance it's falling behind and the more you fall behind the faster you'll fall even more behind so be one chapter ahead be a few days ahead of schedule have that cushion you don't want to be the person who needs to make an academic comeback on the second day of class number three if you don't have that much time to study and there's
10 types of problems or concepts that could show up on the test it's better to practice two problems of each type than to practice doing 20 problems all of the same type number four be honest does studying with other people actually help you or is it just the fact that when other people are around you don't want to pull out your phone or open up YouTube or start playing games and look like an embarrassment to them cuz if that's the case you could pretty much get the same effect just by studying in a public place
where people can see what you're doing or you could study in front of a window so that people outside can see if you're not on task if you want to study inside and not in front of a window but you still need something to keep you accountable you could just record a time-lapse of yourself studying you know like the ones medical students make to show off their 8 hour study sessions and this might seem like a gimmick but I really think everyone should try this at least once cuz first of all you can't go on
your phone while you're using it to record yourself and second of all you're going to watch the time lapse after and that raises the stakes by a lot number five if you need to memorize stuff like a procedure for solving a problem or some scientific vocabulary or really anything you can use active recall there's a bunch of different ways to do it one is to use flashcards but you can also just look at your notes and come up with a bunch of questions based on your notes that'll check your understanding like explain what a mitochondria
does or name the parts of the brain and explain what each part does and later go back and try to answer each question while covering up the part of your notes that answers the question this is especially easy to do if you type your notes if you have notion you can just type SL toggle and hit enter and copy and paste that a bunch of times so now when you click on the Arrow you can type a question and you can put the answer to the question down here and you can hide or show the
answer whenever you want and I guess you can also do this in Google Docs by just highlighting the answer to a question and making it white so you can't see it but of course this technique doesn't work for everyone all the time sometimes you should just take notes how you want it doesn't have to be active recall it doesn't have to be Cornell notes or it doesn't have to be a template whatever way your brain connects things together that's the right method and tip number six studying for a test will take some effort you can
try to make it fun you can do it with friends you can even use chat GPT to feed you practice questions and explain Concepts to you but at the end of the day setting up a Pomodoro Timer is not studying trading an AI model on your textbook is not studying making a study schedule is not studying and thinking about how you're going to study is not studying only one thing truly counts as studying and that's watching a YouTube video about it anyway I'm collecting donations in the form of subscribes to the next video [Music]
