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.
The first time you meet an idea is the expensive 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.