Top 5 things I STOPPED doing to go from D's to Dean's List

You don’t have to write everything your prof says. You should especially never write things that you already understand well. Don’t waste your brainpower thinking about how to format things properly or highlighting your page in 6 different colours.

You have finite brainpower to think while listening to your prof. 0% of it should go to how nice your notes look, 95% of your time should be spent understanding the concepts, and 5% should go to figuring out whether or not it’ll be tested.

After your first quiz, test, or assignment you’ll have a better idea of how right or wrong you were so far. Learning to understand your profs and their archetypes is a valuable skill that’ll help you narrow down what you need to pay attention to and how much time you need to allocate to each of your courses. Splitting your time equally between every course is rarely the most effective choice you can make.

The highest ROI you’ll ever have on your study time is when you are fully concentrated, alone, in the weeds figuring things out on your own in a way that makes sense in your brain.

Lecture time lays the pieces down for how concepts work and what they are, but the time you spend solo, not thinking about anything else, is when your brain solidifies how the concepts go together and when they form permanent connections in your brain. Your time spent in study groups is like a mixture of the two for the most part, with it becoming more like solo studying the fewer people there are.

If there is one thing you can take from this entire post: explaining things between people, especially when you are simply ‘told’ rather than figuring it out yourself, will never be as powerful as deriving the ‘aha’ moment yourself. Your ‘aha’ moments will carry you through exams harder than anyone can instruct you.

This is the absolute worst offender on the list because of how stupid it is. There is a mountain of evidence explaining why this is not just ineffective but completely detrimental. You are better off failing once and learning your lesson rather than repeatedly ‘failing upwards’ by getting away with this.

Sleeping 8 hours is a must before exams (or up to 9 if you are doing serious strength training). Imagine trying to pull an all-nighter to pass the MCAT then scale it down.

Your first few hours of studying are the most effective, and the marginal amount of content you learn worsens as time goes on. Some cramming is inevitable but you should operate with an understanding that the heavier your course load is the more effectively you have to spend your time.

Avoid switching context too often or too drastically (like doomscrolling as your 10 minute break for pomodoro). It is difficult, but the best break time for your study sessions is something super simple and unstimulating like literally staring at a wall or going for a walk.

Walks will help do a soft reset on the brain fuzz that accumulate as you study for longer and longer with the bonus of stopping you from becoming less and less interested in your course content. I can’t recommend the ‘do nothing’ approach enough as it improves your stamina like nothing else when you have to lock in.

Stop going into lectures trying to be a memorization machine and start becoming a learning machine. Learn what builds understanding and what doesn’t. There are very few disciplines in university where rote memorization is a hard prerequisite to understanding the concepts. It’s the rule, not the exception, that you should be trying to understand the underlying concepts of a subject before trying to simply remember all the bits and pieces.

For the things that you must remember, I would recommend a spaced repetition system like Anki or exclam.ai. If you’re trying to memorize 100 facts of varying difficulty, it doesn’t make sense to review all 100 at the same time. After the first review, some items should be reviewed within an hour, others the next day, and the rest a week or two later—depending on how well you know them.

Spaced repetition systems automate this process, scheduling reviews at the optimal time for each fact. This saves you from constantly guessing which hundreds of details you need to revisit before every exam. This is one of the easiest no-brainer wins you can do if your course load is memorization heavy.