My best practices.
The ones you have decided to follow, and the ones the app has worked out from your own results. Take any idea below and it moves up here. One of them lands on your evening rundown each night.
Most of how a course goes is decided before the first test — by how far ahead you are, who you work with, and whether the phone is in the room. Ten things, each with one thing to actually do. The first three are worth most in the week before it starts.
Read the first two lessons before day one.
The first time you meet an idea is the hard one. Do that at home, quietly, with nobody waiting for your hand to go up — then the lesson is your second pass, and you spend it following instead of catching up.
Find out how it's graded before you're graded.
Two courses with identical content are different courses if one is 60% final exam and the other is weekly labs. The weighting tells you where the marks actually live, and it's published.
Pick two or three people to work with, on purpose.
Not whoever sits nearby. The useful group is small, meets at the same time every week, and has at least one person a little ahead of you — explaining it to you is how they review it, so it costs them nothing. A group of four who chat is a social event with textbooks on the table.
Get two lessons ahead, then stay there.
Being ahead isn't about finishing early. It's insurance: a week off with the flu, a bad weekend, a course that suddenly gets hard — all of it costs you nothing while you're two lessons up. Level with the class and the same week costs you a unit.
Put the phone in another room, and time it.
The phone doesn't have to buzz to cost you anything — being in reach is enough, because part of your attention is spent not picking it up. Distance is what works, and an hour is a long way from where most people start. So start where you actually are and move the number up.
- Start the timer on your phone for 1:00.
- Put it face-down in another room.
- Screenshot the timer when you stop it.
- Next time it goes well, add five minutes.
Write the date down the day you're told it.
Every exam you've ever been surprised by was announced. It just went into short-term memory instead of a calendar, and short-term memory has other plans for the next three weeks.
Learn what the question is asking for.
"Describe" and "explain" are not the same word, and one of them wants a reason. A great deal of lost marks are answers that are correct about the wrong thing — and the words that decide it are a short list you can read in twenty minutes.
Say it out loud with the book shut.
Re-reading notes feels like studying and mostly isn't — it's recognising, which is easy, and the exam asks you to produce. The moment you try to say it without the page you find out exactly which part you don't have.
Start with the thing you've been avoiding.
The topic you keep leaving until later is the one costing you the most, and it gets bigger every time it's skipped. It's also the easiest thing to fix, because you already know what it is.
Ask on the day, not the week of the exam.
A question asked the day it comes up takes two minutes. The same question three weeks later has four more lessons built on top of it, and now you're not confused about one thing, you're behind.