Here are some suggestions for how you may improve your strategy for preparing for exams. These are all based on research findings, but we won't bother you with those details.
1. You should consider spreading your review of the material across the term, rather than saving it for the few days prior to the exam, as much as possible. For example, review the contents of a lecture shortly afterwards, while it's fresh in your mind. As the course makes new lectures applicable, review them in the same way, and also review earlier ones, but spending somewhat less time on the ones you've reviewed before. Maybe you do this already, but you should review things in 30 minute chunks, rather than powering through lots of material in a long session - the mind gets tired and confused, the more time it spends doing a task. These suggestions are based on the finding that spaced studying (distributed over time) and expanding series (Session 1: study one thing extensively; Session 2: study a new thing extensively and review more briefly the thing you studied in Session 1; Session 3: study a new thing and study briefly things from Session 1 and 2; and so on...) are the best methods for learning something well.
2. Study material actively - anything at all you can do that goes beyond what is written in the text or notes will be by far more valuable for your learning than just reading over the lecture slides and the textbook chapters. Think actively about how each concept relates to other things that you know or things that have happened in your experience. Think about how the material across lectures (or even within the same lecture) might relate to each other. Think of ways to organize different facts in your mind - sometimes a timeline is good, sometimes a hierarchy works, sometimes facts can be related in the form of a story (e.g., so first they thought this, then that proved to be problematic because of this, then they came up with this new idea, and so on).
3. Be aggressive at evaluating your own learning - if you've really learned something, you should be able to explain it to someone else - you can try to explain concepts to people that aren't taking the class (even if they didn't ask for your fascinating descriptions of psychological concepts). Generate possible multiple-choice questions without looking at your notes.
4. One thing you shouldn't do is try to memorize and get hung up on precise wording. Concepts appear on tests in words and phrases that might differ somewhat from how they are describe in the textbook or in the recorded lectures, yet the underlying meaning will stay the same. We do that on purpose. Our goal in constructing tests is to measure the extent that people really understand the information highlighted in lectures and the textbook at the level of meaning, rather than at the level of specific words. As a result, you’ll need to understand the concepts more deeply than by memorizing them word-for-word from the textbook or from the lecture slides or from the lectures. Strategies 2 and 3 should help with this because you are structuring the material for yourself, rather than relying on the specific way things are described in lectures or in the textbook.
We hope these suggestions are helpful!
