Test Prep Tactics

Protocols to produce A-pluses.

Jun 05, 2022

Estimated Read Time: 9 minutes

After thousands of cuts, shots, and dribbles, one moment and a handful of words suddenly simplified everything. “It’s all about layups and free throws,” he said, “the team that gets more of those is the team that’s going to win.” Although seemingly intuitive to my 6th-grade basketball coach, this concept was groundbreaking for my knee-sleeved, Nike’d up, little baller self. But, in hindsight, the interesting piece is not the truth to that statement with regard to 12-year-old club basketball; rather, the intriguing aspect lies in the recognition that the same statement remains true throughout the various levels of the game. The difference between hooping in youth rec leagues, under Friday night high school lights, in the big leagues at the Boston Garden, and on the grand stage of your local JCC men’s league is not what wins games – easy buckets; instead, the difference lies in how the easy buckets are acquired. This is where the evolution of basketball lies, escalating from a focus on simple skills – like dribbling with your eyes up and using the backboard square – to more advanced concepts – such as written plays and isolation moves – and ultimately to a fluid combination of fundamentals, advanced tactics, and mutant physical ability.

Similar to the game of basketball, from day 1 of kindergarten to the final handshake before receiving your Bachelor’s, the game of academia resides on the same first principle: the student who manages to successfully encode and communicate the given material on test day will achieve victory. In addition, the worlds of hardwood floors and chalkboards collide further, in that the game of academia exhibits a similar evolutionary trait, as students must adapt their tactics over time in order to continue their times-tables triumphs during their exam day ventures. During my 16 years of desktops, slideshows, scantrons, and snoozing through a lecture or two, the leap from high school to college posed the greatest change of pace in terms of this evolution; consequently, it also produced some of the best studying tips and tricks currently sitting in my academic arsenault. Below, I’ve listed a few of my favorites with the intent of helping out a fellow nerd or two on their own journeys transitioning to studying in college; however, although I am primarily speaking to incoming or current college students, I feel the techniques I’m about to share are generally applicable at most levels of schooling and in most learning contexts. Without further ado, here are some of my favorite study protocols from my time in undergrad.

1. Flashcard Frenzy

Whether it be reverse engineering timelines or navigating moral dilemmas, my time as a college student taught me the value of approaching tasks through first principles. In terms of studying, to me, this means beginning by identifying the type of information involved and the format through which it will be administered. During my first couple of years in college, which were largely composed of knocking out general education requirements, like sociology and psychology, I found that most of the information was semantics-based – meaning that it revolved around understanding definitions and concrete facts – and was tested mainly through multiple-choice questions. In these types of courses, I found success doubling down on flashcards because doing so allowed me to familiarize myself with the relevant people, places, and things through the creation of the deck and also helped me latch onto the content through what is viewed by many to be the golden standard of academic learning: active recall.

In particular, the Flashcard Frenzy method provides great ease of use, in that – especially if you are using an app on your phone – you can pull out your deck any time you have 5-10 minutes to kill, and you can progressively create the deck over the ~5-week build up to an exam. This headstart in organization leaves you more time to actually study during exam week instead of cramming to put together your review material alone. In addition, using flashcards simplifies your study strategy by quickly weeding out the people, places, and things you know from those that you don’t, allowing you to more efficiently fill the gaps in your knowledge.

2. Inquiry Approach

“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.” Former U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln

We’ve all been there: it’s around 10:17PM on a Tuesday night, you’re about 2 hours into scrolling through biology slides, and you’re wondering, “What the hell was I doing in class this whole time,” while staring at your jumbled and half-legible scribbled notes. If an exam is Abraham Lincoln’s tree-to-chop, then the act of strategically taking notes in the weeks prior is Honest Abe’s sharpening of his axe. Similar to how progressively building a flashcard deck leading up to an exam pays back disproportionate dividends, tactical note-taking can both increase the efficiency of your studying and improve your exam performance.

The largest issue I found with note-taking over the years was finding the balance between writing down enough of what I saw on the screen – which is particularly troublesome when you get caught up obsessing over recording the professor’s exact spelling and grammar like I sometimes do – and actually listening to the professor’s explanations, the latter of which can be more or less important, depending upon how far the given professor drifts from what is projected upfront. So far, what I have named, the Inquiry Approach, the method of solely writing down questions as your notes, is my favorite strategy for taking notes. Not only does it simplify the writing process, limiting the number of words you need to put to paper, but it also allows you to copy exact questions the professor poses to the class – questions that are often replicated on quizzes and tests – and it leaves you with a host of practice questions for review time. If you are interested in learning more about this tactic, check out the video below, from which I first learned about the concept.

3. Picasso Process

Although much of my coursework exhibited crossover and connected back to my major in one way or another, a handful of classes served as curveballs, throwing me into novel mediums. In this regard, taking my first military science courses sophomore year serves as an ideal example, in that doing so engulfed me in an unfamiliar world that required rapid adoption of a certain thought process. For classes like these, I found that zooming out to the big picture facilitated adaptation to the new content and provided significant clarity.

In particular, I was challenged to learn the ins and outs of different tactical missions – such as raids, ambushes, and recons – during which I found drawing out the big picture of each operation to be the most helpful learning method. I figure that writing out the different missions’ movements and critical tasks aided in memorizing the steps to execution; however, I think that the greatest contribution from, what I’ll call, the Picasso Process was helping me understand the logical flow through visualization. Further, my compilation of sketches resembled the playbooks I knew from competing in sports my whole life, which enabled me to link an unfamiliar world with one I recognized and understood. Lastly, this technique built my confidence for when it came time to actually plan one of the missions from scratch – similar to how you would need to construct a chain of synthesis reactions from scratch in organic chemistry – as I had already created countless operations through my drawings.

4. Teaching Technique

How do you know when you’ve done enough and you're ready for the exam? Or, maybe more importantly, how do you know you’ve actually learned anything and haven’t just temporarily regurgitated a slideshow? Unfortunately, you often don’t know if you’re ready for the big test until you find it sitting on your desk, and – maybe even more unfortunate – you might not know whether you’ve really been educated until you’re $30,000 in debt, your employer asks you a question related to your major, and the only semblance of words you can produce is, “uhhhh.”

During my time studying, I found the Teaching Technique, or attempting to teach a given concept or set of material to somebody else, to be one of the best methods to get around the previously mentioned conundrums. Phone calls with your parents are a solid opportunity to exercise this tactic, as parents tend to be interested in that sort of thing – both the development of their kid and the return on their hefty investment in them; plus, this could serve as an added benefit of softening them up before you ask for some pocket change (does a mobile bank transfer count as pocket change if your phone is in your pocket?). In addition, I find that you reap the greatest studying benefits from this tactic when the person you are teaching is least familiar with the subject, as this requires you to break down the concepts to a greater extent; consequently, you must understand the details of those concepts to a deeper degree. In terms of application, I found this type of studying to be most suitable for courses like cellular biology and genetics that demand mechanistic comprehension. You don’t truly understand the structure and functionality of DNA until you can whip out a pen and napkin and explain it to Mom and Dad.

5. Memory Palace Method

As I mentioned above, some classes require semantic memorization, while others require conceptual understanding; additionally, as I moved up the collegiate ladder, I encountered courses that required both. For these classes, whether it be neuroscience or biochemistry, I found no greater tool than the holy grail of memory techniques: the Memory Palace. Founded upon the idea that humans’ spatial and visual memory is superior to that leveraged through rote memorization, this technique helped me memorize a deck of cards in under 3 minutes as well as the pathways of glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, lipogenesis, and cholesterol synthesis for my biochemistry exams. In particular, the memory palace method is useful for memorizing long orders of actions, people, or things that are interlinked. I plan on diving deeper into this mental tactic in a future post, but, for now, check out the clips below if you want more details.