DBoy's video: Easy Ways to Study for an Exam

Do you know some easy ways to study for an exam? It certainly is not falling asleep with your face in the book, praying for osmosis to work, as you did last time. Yeah, I flunked that endeavor. I also know that studying by hypnosis does not work. How do you manage that? Most subjects don't have hypnosis tapes. Listen to a talk on the topic while falling asleep or set Youtube videos on the subject on loop while you try to sleep, worrying about the test. You need some realistic ways to study. Such as? Read the book, then identify the key vocabulary terms and dates. Write them down to help remember them. Why write it down? It is already written down in the text book. The process of writing it down in your own words, the act of having to think about it, increases your retention. In contrast, copying the teacher's words verbatim doesn't increase retention. That's pretty labor intensive. So is working a second job to pay the student loan payments for taking this class a second time. What about classes like chemistry and math? Vocabulary is only the first chapter or so. Practice, practice, and more practice. That's like whole location thing realtors say. Repetitive and not very relevant. Break out a study guide by a company like Schaum's. Work a few dozen of each type of problem, checking your work against the answer key in the back. That's more tedious than writing the same answer over and over again. In the case of math and chemistry, you have to learn the theory and the technique because you are way too old for math facts. I still remember those really annoying multiplication math fact songs. Falling asleep to those was probably the closest to learning by hypnosis you'll ever achieve.