3. Revise, Revisit
One of the biggest blessing humans have is to remember and equally good blessing is to forget.
Brain is one intelligence piece of fat you got. It constantly measures what you need most and keep that memory nearby so that it is available to you the moment you want it and have no problem. However, if you don’t use certain information for long then brain automatically puts it away further with the time and in the end almost delete it.
Think of a brain as a normal muscle and with every muscle you have to keep using it to keep it healthy and big. You need to do the same with your neurons but in a little different fashion as what I have to do is to access the information once in a while.
Normally you have like 500 pages a book, some few hundred pages of notes and few other hundred of references to remember. To ensure you don’t forget you need to recall this information every now and then but its not easy. When you are studying you are getting more and more topics to remember every day and the chances are that by the time you get back to the earlier topics you will have to recharge them from scratch.
I can understand this frustration as I have been through student life myself and I hated this feeling of forgetting as I cannot stand forgetting what I need to remember at least until I pass the exam.
Solution was again a mix of usual routine with a little unusual scheme. For ever topic I used to have a pattern of revision which is like this: 1-2-4-8-16-32-64
That means if I had learnt something new today January 18 then I will revise it again on:
- January 19
- January 21
- January 25
- February 2 and so on
You might be thinking that its a big task to do as more and more topics are added. Believe me its not but it does require dedication.
But how should I revise? Should I write it or just skim? This depends on the type of content. If this is theory and not technical I used to skim. If its technical I used to write in bullets and compare with base content to check if I am missing something and if is about numbers then do one/two questions depending on the time I have and I used to do the most challenging question first while revising.
By the time you have exams in few days you are already prepared and had things revised many times over and you will not have to skip a good sleep before exam day.
4. Face it earliest what you fear the most
I can’t go much simpler than this.
If you are leaving difficult topics for the weekend then better not do it. Tackle them in routine. Don’t think of sparing time and then going to them as you will never find enough time to do them and in the end you will never be able to get them done.
If topic is long and difficult, divide the whole in small bits that you can manage. If you cannot then ask your friend who is good at that topic and if you are like me who don’t have such friends who like to study then ask your teacher to help you do it.
But hold on a second. Don’t take me wrong when I say do the most difficult first. I don’t mean that if you have some unfinished business in basics and you skip it and move to advanced topics. What I mean is if you have a topic or a subject that you hate don’t ignore it. Otherwise that one topic will hunt your confidence down in other areas too.
Just as an example in one professional subject a question from specific topic is must and that topic alone consists of 5 chapters and 20+ practice questions. With a weightage of 30 marks in the exams I find that whoever leave that topic till the end majority of them end up dropping the subject altogether and don’t appear in the exam.
So you must not be having any bone of contention planted by your laziness. To me there is no such thing as “not able to find time” its either you don’t like it or you are lazy and you are not accepting it and justifying it in a wrong way. And if you say that you don’t like it then please learn this thing already that you don’t have an option to like or dislike if a certain topic is in the syllabus as you have to do it.
So putting likes and dislikes out of question the only thing that now remains is being lazy. As I said earlier, have everything right and get one thing wrong [attitude] and the whole thing will fall apart automatically. Laziness is one of those curses that don’t let you catch up with your responsibilities. So don’t be irresponsible.
5. Find a guide
The ones who are lucky enough to afford the company of teachers then they can ask questions easily if they have confusion. However, the ones who are doing self study find it difficult to great extent. But now a days the trend is shifting and more and more students are preparing on their own especially for professional certifications.
With the explosion of social websites it is now easy to get in touch with great people who offer great support for nothing at social groups, fan pages, twitter accounts etc. Find those souls and its not hard to find them these days.
Better yet is to join discussion boards/forums where students from different corners of the world come together to ask different questions and can be a big source of learning as you can learn from others’ mistakes and confusions.
PakAccountants is one of such website that provides different study resources for different qualifications. Do follow our updates and keep visiting regularly to catch up with new releases.
Great tips. Thanks