How to study for exams without cramming

Why cramming feels like it works

Cramming does produce short-term results. In Roediger and Karpicke’s study, students who reread a passage four times in one sitting did best on a test five minutes later, and worst a week later [1]. Massed study puts material in reach for a little while, and it feels fluent while you do it.

Most students know this, and many cram anyway. In one survey of 324 college students, 53% said they cram [2]. Among 901 students who used flashcards, nearly 30% used them only in the last day or two before an exam [3]. And in Kornell’s experiments, most students believed massed study had worked better for them even when their own scores showed spacing had worked better for 90% of them [4].

What works better

Spread the same work out. Spaced sessions consistently beat the same time in one block, and the advantage grows with the delay before the test [5]. See spaced repetition.

Test yourself instead of rereading. Recalling and then checking answers is the other high-utility technique in the research [6]. See retrieval practice.

Relearn in several sessions. In successive relearning, you practice each item until you get it right, then come back to it in later sessions and do it again. In a real psychology course, this approach improved exam performance on the targeted concepts by more than a letter grade [7]. Over a ten-week semester it beat restudying for the same amount of time [8]. Differences in how well you learned something the first time largely fade after about three spaced relearning sessions.

Mix your topics. Once you understand each topic, practice them mixed together, especially the ones that are easy to confuse. Exams don’t tell you which chapter a question comes from. See interleaving.

Protect your sleep. In a study of relearning across a night of sleep or a day awake, the sleep group relearned twice as fast and remembered about two and a half times as much six months later [9]. Another study compared a nap with an hour of cramming: both helped equally 30 minutes later, but only the nap’s benefit was still clearly there a week later [10]. In a correlational study of a university course, sleep over the month before the exam was related to grades, while sleep the night before was not [11].

A plan for the weeks before finals

From the first week of the course

• After each lecture, write down what you remember before rereading anything. Then turn the key ideas into questions.
• Review the questions a day or two later, after sleep. Keep the ones you got right in rotation, at longer gaps.

Four to six weeks out

• Make a list of every topic on the exam. Mark the ones you can explain from memory and the ones you can’t.
• Spend most of your time on the second group, but keep short reviews of the first.
• Start mixing practice across topics.

The last two weeks

• Do practice questions in the format of the exam, mixed and timed. Check every answer.
• Spend the time on what you get wrong, not on what you already know.
• Keep reviews short and frequent rather than long and rare.

The last few days

• Light review of what you have already learned. This is not the time for new material.
• Sleep. An all-nighter trades a little extra review for a worse brain to recall it with.

If you are already behind

Spacing is a rule of thumb, not a gate. If the exam is in five days, five short sessions on five days still beat one long one. Start with recall, not rereading: ten minutes trying to answer questions from memory tells you exactly where to spend the next hour.

References

1. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
2. Hartwig, M. K., & Dunlosky, J. (2012). Study strategies of college students: Are self-testing and scheduling related to achievement? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(1), 126–134. doi.org/10.3758/s13423-011-0181-y
3. Zung, I., Imundo, M. N., & Pan, S. C. (2022). How do college students use digital flashcards during self-regulated learning? Memory, 30(8), 923–941. doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2022.2058553
4. Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317. doi.org/10.1002/acp.1537
5. Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02209.x
6. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
7. Rawson, K. A., Dunlosky, J., & Sciartelli, S. M. (2013). The power of successive relearning: Improving performance on course exams and long-term retention. Educational Psychology Review, 25(4), 523–548. (Abstract.) link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-013-9240-4
8. Higham, P. A., Zengel, B., Bartlett, L. K., & Hadwin, J. A. (2022). The benefits of successive relearning on multiple learning outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(5), 928–944. (Abstract.) doi.org/10.1037/edu0000693
9. Mazza, S., Gerbier, E., Gustin, M.-P., Kasikci, Z., Koenig, O., Toppino, T. C., & Magnin, M. (2016). Relearn faster and retain longer: Along with practice, sleep makes perfect. Psychological Science, 27(10), 1321–1330. doi.org/10.1177/0956797616659930
10. Cousins, J. N., Wong, K. F., Raghunath, B. L., Look, C., & Chee, M. W. L. (2019). The long-term memory benefits of a daytime nap compared with cramming. Sleep, 42(1), zsy207. doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsy207
11. Okano, K., Kaczmarzyk, J. R., Dave, N., Gabrieli, J. D. E., & Grossman, J. C. (2019). Sleep quality, duration, and consistency are associated with better academic performance in college students. npj Science of Learning, 4(1), 16. doi.org/10.1038/s41539-019-0055-z