How to Study for Exams: Learn How To Rank In The 99th Percentile

1. Introduction: Are you tired of spending hours behind your desk studying without getting the scores that you are looking for. Not anymore. In our new course on how to study for exams, we are applying all the techniques and secrets you need to know your exam. Starting from the overall study planning resources, going into techniques on how to increase retention of information, how to study effectively, and how to increase your spelling productivity. We also covered extremely important topics such as how to take notes, how to review information, how to solve questions on your exam, and some techniques for the final days of your preparation. This course is based on my study experience, which helped me around consistently. Number one, all my medical school years and graduated as a valedictorian of my medical school class. These techniques also helped me is the United States licensing examinations. This step one and step two, CK and I ended up matching up my number one choice in plastic surgery residency in the United States as an international medical graduate. 2. Resources | Introduction: Hello friends and welcome to this lesson in which we'll be talking about the resources that you should use to prepare for your exam. Identifying the best and most efficient resources is key in guaranteeing success to any exam you're doing your life. It might be obvious that you need to prepare from the materials that your teacher or the lecturer gives you to prepare for an exam. But sometimes it's not that simple. Sometimes these materials are not good enough to guarantee a good score on the exam. Sometimes these resources are not enough for you to understand the topic. So therefore, you need additional materials for you to be able to understand the concepts very well. Sometimes you might be able to understand materials, get good grades if you study the materials, but you will need some additional resources to grasp better idea of the subject. Maybe these resources that you have, maybe these materials do not cover the wide spectrum of the material that you are looking for. You want to explore more and that's why you might need to explore more resources. But you need to be very careful in choosing these resources to be able to still get a good score and grasp of the concepts. That's why in this lesson I'll be going over the details of how to pick these resources that can help you understand the concepts. Not waste so much time and still get good grades on the subject. Also, sometimes you'll see students looking for more resources if they're looking to travel abroad. So you might be studying in your country and you're studying the materials in your own language. And you want to study other materials because you're interested in a scholarship outside your country. You're interested in a fellowship outside your country and you want to study additional materials in addition to your school materials so you can guarantee success on these exams that are international outside your school. Exams. Also, if you want to study things in English, sometimes you went to school materials are not in English and you're going to get access to the international knowledge about your topic. So studying materials in English in addition to your subjects might help you do that. That's why in this lesson I'll be going over the details of how to choose these materials. How to be able to understand the concepts of the subjects in an efficient way without wasting so much time and still getting good grades on your school exams. 3. How to identify the best resources?: The first question is how to identify these resources? Where can you search for these resources? And in my opinion, the first step that you can take to explore other resources, other materials to study from is your classmates. So go and ask around, ask your friends who are in the same class. Friends who are in all their classes that can have used different materials, materials and see what their opinions are. So listen to as many people as possible and then you can make your informed decision. So asking classmates around about their previous materials, especially if they share the same goals. If you have someone who is interested in traveling abroad and they are interested in the same exam that you want to do other than your school exam, you can go and ask them and see what worked for them, especially those who succeeded and get good scores. Their school exam in addition to the international exam they are interested in. If someone is interested in pursuing things outside the country in English, for example, and you scroll materials are in a different language and you see somebody who has done the exact same thing, it makes sense to go and ask them. Go and ask around, especially those in your school who are familiar with your school materials and are interested in broadening the understanding of the subject or going outside the country and doing specific things in addition to their school exam. So one thing is to ask your classmates, people in your school, and that would be pretty simple. The other way is to go and look online. For example, you can search on Google what are the best materials to study anatomy, for example, or biochemistry? And you can get a huge list of options that you can choose from the negative side about using experiences online in that these people might not be familiar with the system in your school. So the materials that they studied, for example, for biochemistry, might work only with their school materials. Now with your school materials, with their scheduled, with your schedule. So that's why, in my opinion, asking friends who are familiar with the system in your school might help you more, but it also is pretty simple. You can search it online. It's free to look at experiences of different people. You can look on Google, you can look on YouTube of different experiences with different books, different videos, different study resources that can help you choose the best resource to prepare for your exams. Some might ask, I found so many resources and experiences online I can get overwhelmed. I found over a 100 YouTube videos. I found over a 100 blogs on Google, multiple social media platforms recommending different resources. And I get overwhelmed, what do I do? And that's a very legitimate question. I get asked about that every single day because every student who succeeded my chair, their experience and now you have hundreds of students sharing the different experiences as sometimes contradictory information. So what to do in this situation? One way of looking at this is looking at the argument. So look at the outcome of these people. What were their scores in their school. They find these resources helpful in an efficient way or study for 23 years to get the same outcome. So time is a very important factor in the equation and the outcome, the score they get what they were looking for or they didn't share. If they didn't share, we're not sure if they actually GOT the outcome that they were looking for, good score or the scholarship that they were they were hoping to get or just pass, barely passed. So we're looking at the outcome and time that they took to study these resources. Another important factor to keep in mind when choosing these resources. If that's what works for someone, that might not work for you. So somebody might have scored a 100% on the exam After studying in book eight. But if you study the same book a, the same way they recommended, it might work for you. And the reason is you, our brains are not the same. You might be someone who likes to learn from books, that person likes to learn from videos, or you'd like to learn from images and that person likes to learn from text. So that's why what works for someone might not necessarily work for someone else. So you have to ask yourself, are you someone who likes to learn from books, which is merely texts, images, atlas, videos, searching online, Q banks. Look at in the past, what has been working for you in your middle school, high school? What have you been successful with? What did you find is learning with or you find difficulty learning with. And based on that, you can choose the type of material that you can use to prepare for your exam. In my personal experience, I always find the question banks the number one in any preparation materials because they can present the information to you in a way that you'll be tested on. That's why whenever I search for resources now, I searched for question bags number one, because it can help me understand how will I be tested on the information. And also we'll talk about that in future lessons about the active learning and the act of retrieval. Question Banks are the best to activate these ways too for learning. So that's why question banks, in my opinion, come number one, images are my second go-to because our brains like to learn from images more than mere texts. So that's why whenever I see a video that can explain a certain technique or images that can summarize and information. I prefer that overtakes. However, I also like to learn from texts. So after looking at the image, seeing the relative information next to each other, I like to read from texts because sometimes you might see an image and say, Now I understand the concept. But if you read the texts, the texts might explain dimensions that you didn't see in the picture in the first place. You might have missed these minor details in a picture when you look at it quickly, but supplementing the text with the image can help you understand more. So in my opinion, combination of these would help the best, but also you have to be careful about time and how much does each resource. And we'll go over that in the plan lesson where we will talk about how to use the different resources with the time available that you have. So again, ask yourself, what has been working for you in the past? What has not been working for you, and choose the type of material based on that experience. 4. Testing different resources! : Another tip that can help you choose the resource is to try it yourself. So sometimes we read experiences are very successful people and this book might have worked with 4% a, but when I try it, I don't like it. So don't continue if you don't see that this book is helping you. So after reading ten pages of a book that is a thousand pages, you're seeing that you're not understanding the information or your understanding of the inflammation, but it's not adding anything new. Don't go and finish the whole thousand pages and then realize, I wasted my time. You can try the first ten pages, maybe 15 pages and see if it's working. You can go on. If you think that this book is helping you, you can go on. Otherwise, just stop and choose another resource. That's the beauty of learning is that you can try herself without hurting yourself. You only waste some time, but you can just try it without wasting the whole time trying to finish the resource and then realizing it's not working. So try it yourself. Maybe you go to the library and see the different books. Some books have nicer images than others. More text, more relevant information to the area of your study. So go to the library, try the different resources, have a look at them. Now even in, on Google, you can try some books, have a look at the first few pages, or they give you a sample chapter four books, sometimes even the courses, the videos, they give you a sample question banks the same. So try it yourself. Don't waste so much time trying it. Just give, try a sample and see if it's working for you. You can go ahead and continue the full resource. 5. Full vs partial studying of additional resources! : Another very important tip when you're choosing other resources to supplement your score materials is that you need full studying of these resources are just partial studying by full studying. And I mean, that you need to finish that resource from beginning to end, from a to Z. So start with the first page. Read the whole book, the whole course, the whole YouTube video, the whole question bank until the end versus partial studying. And that is mainly used when you're understanding the concepts in your school materials, but you need to supplement that with additional one subject so you don't read the whole book. That is, in addition to your school resource, you only read one chapter or there is an idea in your school materials that are really good, but some ideas are vague. You can not understand what they're talking about. So in this situation, you can go and supplement your school materials with understanding of these concepts that you can understand from your school materials. So let me give you an example. Let's say you're studying anatomy from your school resource. And they presented you with the clinical information about yogic aneurysm, which means that the aorta is large and you can understand what does that mean, or the clinical relevance of that information on how does this disease manifest? What are the presentation? How do patients present with this disease? So you can go and read specifically about aortic aneurism. You don't have to read a whole anatomy book from beginning to end. If you are satisfied with your school materials, these materials are helping you and they are enough for you to understand the concepts and you don't need to go do other exams other than your school exams. So in this situation, I prefer to do partial study. Again, you don't go and open a book from beginning to end. You supplement your school materials with partial studying from other resources. And in this case, you might be using a book and choose partial studying from that book. So you would open specific pages that talk about that specific thing, read about them and go back to your school material. You might be studying ten per cent of that additional resource instead of studying from beginning to end. And the reason why I prefer that strategy if it's working, is because it saves time. Sometimes you don't have time to study a full thousand pages from beginning to end in addition to your school materials. So that's why sometimes I prefer the partial studying because it saves you time and it supplements the missing parts from your school materials. So one way of doing the partial studying is having a book that is really good addition to your school materials and go and search for the specific topic that you are lacking in the understanding. And so again, you would find the topic that you can understand. You go to the index or the table of contents, read about that specific subject and go back to your school materials. Another way, especially now with the advancement of the Internet, the plethora of information available on Google, you can search on Google. So instead of searching aortic aneurysm in the book, you can just type in Google aortic aneurysm presentation. You'll find tons of blogs, of websites, of videos that can explain that concept to you. So you can supplement your partial studying now, instead of books with information available online and it's much easier to find rather than go on looking in a book. You can find any information now online. So that's why you can do this partial studying, just using Google or YouTube, in which you can watch a video that is five-minutes instead of having to read the full book. So when you're searching for study materials, keep in mind, are you looking for full studying of these resources are only partial. Studying. For a full studying refers to having a resource and studying it from beginning to end. Partial studying, you go and look in a specific chapter in a book, or specific information from a website, from blog, from a YouTube video, and supplementing the information you have from your school materials with that additional studying, some might ask, how do I know whether I need to do full studying of additional resources or partial studying. The answer depends on your goal. If your goal is to pass your school exams, get good grades. Ask your your prior periods. Those who did the same subjects last year or the year before, did the school materials help them to get good grades on the school exam? And if they answered yes, you can supplement your study resources with partial studying only to understand the concepts that are vague or not clear to you. If they told you the school materials were not good to help me get a good score. And I supplemented my school materials with a full reading of an additional resource. In this case, you go ahead and do the full reading of the resource also depends on time. You have time to study the school materials in addition to the full reading of other materials or not. So the combination of time and you've got, some might ask, can I replace my school materials with full studying of other materials because I want to study in another language or I'm interested in coming to the US. So I want to study the materials that work for the US. And meanwhile, these resources and helped me pass my exam. This scenario is very tricky because I'm not sure in your school or in your exam whether the other resources, if you do the full thing of other resources, will help you with help you pass your school exams or get good grades on that. So you have to ask people who have tried these resources before whether this strategy worked for them. For example, I've seen many medical students who use the full reading of other resources to replace their school materials. And that strategy worked very well for them. For other people it did not. So the use of other resources to replace your school materials without studying them, just the other resources. That's a tricky situation and you have to ask people who have tried that before to see if that worked for them. Then finally a factor that might play a role in choosing the partial versus full studying of additional resources is whether you're interested in studying abroad. So imagine you're studying medical school in China and you're studying medicine in Chinese, then you want to study abroad after you finish your medical school in France. And there the system is totally different. The materials might be different, although definitely there are some similarities between the subjects. But first it's different language. Second, it might be a totally different system. The way they test you in China might be different than the way they do that in France. So to prepare for the French exams, you might do the full studying of the French materials in addition to the Chinese materials. In this case, you might be doing that along your medical school. So imagine you are now in school and you study the subject in Chinese and the same subject based on different materials, you might not have time to do that, the full studying of the French resources. So you might choose to do that after you finish your school. So again, the full studying can be used if you're interested in studying abroad. So you study the materials of that country, that specific exam you're interested in doing. Another reason why you might be interested in doing the full studying if it's a really good resource and it has worked for people in your school, getting good grades or passing their school exams because you don't want to be studying other resources fully and ignoring your school and will not be able to pass your school exams. Because remember, at the end of the day you are in your school, you have to pass that exam to be able to graduate. But if it's replacing your school materials and you're still able to get good grades or pass the exam, and this is your goal, then it's fine. You can definitely use it. 6. How many additional resources should you study?: Now I want to talk about some common mistakes that students make when choosing the different resources for, when studying for an exam. The first one is choosing so many resources. Whenever you start preparing for an exam, you get excited. You want to learn the most out of this exam, all of this material. And you go and read all the experiences online, listening to everyone. And you end up with a huge pack of books and videos and question banks that you want to prepare. And I've realized that this is a very common mistakes about every student who's preparing for an exam. Because in the beginning again, you're, you're, you're excited. There is so much time, so there's maybe 34 months to prepare for the exam. And you say to yourself, I can finish all these books. Realistically, that is not possible because if you go and calculate the number of pages and the time it takes to read each page and the time for the review, it's not realistic to finish all these resources. So in my opinion, you should focus on one or two resources and have the time to review them. Create flashcards, notes that we'll talk about in future lessons, rather than diluting your time with so many resources, so many question bags without having the ability to review this information. Well, if you're asking, how can I know what is the best resource to study for this subject? In my opinion, there is no one single best resource to study for anything, there might be two good resources, three good resources. But the mistake is to study the three of them. If you pick one of them, studied very well, you might get the same outcome if you study the second or the third one, the mistake is trying to study everything and then diluting the time that having time to review the information and not being able to perform well on the exam. So again, try the resource as we've been talking about in the previous lesson, when we talked about the strategies that you can use to pick the best resource, you can try it yourself and if you're happy with it, you are able to understand people have tried it and they succeeded. You can go ahead with it. It doesn't have to be the one single best resource. It's the resource that works for you. 7. Resources | Common mistakes : The second mistake I see students make whenever they're preparing for an exam and choosing a resource is doing the full studying of a resource when only partial studying is needed. So let's say your teacher gave you lectures. These lectures, we're good. We're good enough to pass the exam. And you go and study a full book that can supplement your materials. But in reality, only partial reading of that book is needed, or only partial reading of resources online are needed to understand the full material. Or even if you don't have school materials, let's say you have an exam that you are studying abroad and they didn't specify what resources to choose from. So you have to go out on your own and prepare for this exam. An example of that is the step exams for medical students in the US or people coming from outside the US to do the exams in the US, they have the similar step one, USMLE step two, for these exams there is no recommended list of books. Everyone have tried different things and everyone has succeeded with different set of experiences. So in this case, you don't have school materials that you have to study from. Its like open so you have to go and pick whatever you think is best or whatever you think is gonna work. So in this case, you might choose Book one and then you read book one from beginning to end. And only partial studying of book two is needed. But you go and read book one fully. You go and read book to fully and you go and read books three fully. And now you're lost between so many information. You're not able to review anything. You didn't create nodes, you didn't create flashcards, and you didn't have the time to absorb the information very well. Again, don't do the full reading of an additional resource. If only partial studying of that resource is going to get you the same outcome. Book a is good, but there are some missing parts. Go and read portions of book two. Don't read the full book to. Book one is not good and you need full setting of book two. That's a different story. But if only partial studying of that resource is going to help you get the same outcome with the same, with much less time. I would definitely recommend the partial studying, which might be also again, as I said, from resources online, Google and YouTube. The third mistake I see students make when choosing resources is blindly following people who have succeeded in this exam. I highly recommend that you ask people around you listen to people, understand the reasoning why they chose that resource versus another, but don't blindly follow someone. And the reason is, as I said before, what works for them might not work for you. You might be someone who is visual, likes to learn from images, videos. They might like to learn from text question banks. So listen to other people advice. Then you have to try it yourself. See if it's working for you. And if yes, you can go ahead and continue with that resource. The fourth mistake is not adjusting. Sometimes students start with the resource, close their eyes and go ahead and finish the whole thousand pages without asking themselves, is this book helping me? Is this resource helping me? So I recommend that you start with the resource. Try ten pages, maybe five-minutes, if it's a video, ten minutes, and that's yourself, is this a resource that is worth continuing? And if the answer is yes, go ahead and finish it. If not, go ahead and change the resource, because this resource might not be the best for your style of learning. But again, be careful of changing so many resources. If you start with book one and go to two and you don't like to on your change 2345. And you'll see that none of the books that people have talked about fits your learning. You have to ask yourself what is going on here, maybe as the advice of someone who has experienced with that subject to identify the problem. Because if you're changing so many resources, the problem might be in the way you learning, you have to choose a totally different method rather than change a book every day. So if it's working, go ahead and continue. If not, try to adjust, see what the problem is, and go ahead and choose another resource. The fifth mistake is not understanding. Sometimes you choose the resource you like the pictures you read, but you're not able to understand the concepts in this book. If that is happening, you have to change the resource or supplement that resource with the partial studying idea I was talking about. So again, understanding is key to learning and we'll talk about that in detail in future lessons. But if you're not able to understand that book, because maybe it's a higher level. Maybe it's a review book that has only the highlights of an inflammation. You need to start with another book. You have to adjust, either choose a different resource or supplement that book with partial studying of another resource. And finally, the sixth mistake I'm going to talk about today is studying a resource without creating a review structure. And this structure could be questions you write, notes or flashcards. Any way for you to review that inflammation after you finish the resource. Because especially for large materials, books that are thousands of pages, courses that are hours and hours long. You might not have the time to review the whole material again after you finish and don't expect that you're going to remember everything you studied after. You go once, once through a resource. So you have to create a structure for you to review the important information, the one that you might not remember without having to review the whole question bank or the whole book or the whole course. That's why creating that structure from the beginning, having an idea of how are you going to review this resource after you finish, it is crucial whenever you're choosing any resource. So in summary, don't use so many resources whenever you're studying for an exam, pick a few resources and focus on them rather than diluting your time on so many resources without folk studying. Second, don't do a full studying of a different resource. If only partial studying of that resources needed. So you have to start with the main resources that you are studying from and see, do you need that resource? The other resourcefully are only portions of that resource to supplement the main material you are studying. Third, don't follow someone blindly including my advice. Listen to advice of different people, listen to their experiences, and then choose the materials that you think would work best for you. Fourth, adjust your plan. If you start with the resource and you like it, go on. If you don't think this resource is helping you, you can adjust and change the resource to something that can help you more. Five, make sure that you are able to understand the concepts in that resource. Don't just blindly read the pages and flip the pages without grasping the concepts behind these words that you are reading. And finally, create a structure from the beginning. Know whatever way works best for you to review that information. Because don't expect to remember everything from the first round. And that brings us to the end of our discussion about choosing the resources to study for your exam. 8. The three stages of a study plan : Now that you chose the resources that you'll be using for your preparation, you have to create a study plan or a map that you'll be using from the first day of your cooperation until the exam day. That map can tell you or give you an idea of how much time you will be dedicated for each resource, for each page, for question banks, for assessment tools. So you have an overall big idea about the path that you'll be following until the exam day. To have a successful study plan, you have to have a study schedule. By steady schedule, I mean, how much time are you dedicating for each resource and each time? Personally, I like to divide the study plan into three stages. The first one is the initial stage in which you scope the material. You start reading the information, understanding of the information and put multiple lines on their understanding. Because in my opinion, the main focus or the main goal of the first stage is to understand the ideas discussed in the subject. And you will realize once you go to the next stage in that some information will be forgotten. Some of you will remember, but it's fine, totally fine. It's totally normal that you forget information. So main focus on the first stage is to understand. If you are able to understand, some information will go to the long-term memory, some will be forgotten. That's why you have a second or third stage. So totally normal if you forget, but focus mainly on understanding. After you do your first round, you're familiar now with the constantly discussed in the subject and the resource that you stole it from, you go to the next stage, which is the review. That's why I told you in the previous lesson. You have to have a structure of a review because no one will remember everything from the first time they read it. That's why you have to have a structure of a review. So whenever you go to the next stage, you have notes or flashcards or questions that you can review from. The focus of the second stage is to repeat the information you studied in the first stage, the most important ones, the ones that you found difficulty with, but you already understood these concepts. So now the focus is on committing these information to long-term memory. And we will discuss different strategies that you can use to have information going into long-term memory easier. But now I want to focus on this study plans to be scheduled. Again, the focus on the second stage is to review the information, can meet more information to long-term memory and sold more and more questions. So this stage tries to imitate the exam because the more questions you solve, the more you are similar to the exam situation. So the focus of the first stage is to understand the concepts. The focus on the second stage is to review some more questions and memorize. Now going to the third stage, which is the final review. The stage in which you look at the most important ideas discussed in the subject. Try to review it. Crash, review the week before the exam. Focus on the most important concepts here. Solve more and more questions and get ready for the exam. It's the final stage of review that adds a layer of reinforcement for the high-yield concepts that you reviewed. In the second stage, I had multiple students. Ask me, can you send us your study schedule, how you divide your time between the different subjects. I highly recommend not using anybody's else scheduled. And the reason is simply we are different in the way we study the speed in which we go with things. For example, if I study two pages today and yesterday, one page a day, or you study four pages a day, how can our schedule schedules match? So that's why you need to create your own study schedule that will be specific to your speed. The way that you understand the subject that you are studying and mix specific to you. Simple example of a study schedule could be that you have a subject that you need to study, a book that is 1 thousand pages, and you only have ten days to study this book. So how do you divide the time by the number of pages you have? So if you have 1 thousand pages and you have only ten days to study this material, that means you need to finish at least 100 pages a day to be able to finish the full book before these ten days past. But if we want to complicate things more, you have to remember that you need to review some materials before you go to the exam. So you might divide the 1 thousand pages by seven days and keep three days of review. Or you might divide 1 thousand pages by sig days, six days, and then leave two days for review, two days for solving questions. So that's why it's not a simple task to do a study schedule. It requires a lot of thinking, a lot of adjustment. Let's say that you divided the 1 thousand pages by ten days and you ended up studying a 100 pages a day are used to pause to study 100 pages a day. And you started studying, and you realize that you can't finish 100 pages a day. You are barely finishing 20 pages a day. So what do you do in this situation? Maybe you find an easier resource that is not 1 thousand pages, maybe 100 pages. And you can finish the 100 pages in five days since you're finishing only 20 pages a day. Another scenario might be you're finished a portion of the book and you go into the exam, and if you're lucky you pass. If you're not lucky, you don t. So that's why you need to adjust your schedule on how things are going. And now we'll go over more complicated examples. More complicated study schedules are more realistic. Schedules that will show you how you can divide your time between the different materials. But the point I was trying to bring up here is that you have to adjust the steady schedule. The steady schedule is very fluid, is very dynamic. It's not static. You put a steady schedule and you blindly follow it because things change. You might be finishing things faster. What if you're finishing 200 pages a day instead of 100? Now you finish the whole material in five days and you have five more days to study, more materials, more questions, and you would adjust the steady schedule based on how you're progressing. So remember it's not the end of the world. If you don't follow the schedule exactly, you have to adjust the study resources, the time based on how things are going. You might cut the resources in half. You might add resources if you have more time. It's very fluid, it's very dynamic, it's not static. Now let's go over some realistic examples of students who have to study specific resources with specific time and see how this time could be divided among the different resources. These are just examples. So even if I help someone create a study schedule, that doesn't mean it's the only way of doing study schedule. There are multiple ways, but this is one example. And also yourself. If you create a study schedule or someone create study scheduled for you, that doesn't mean it's the only way or the only path to success and the grid score on the exam, there are multiple ways, and this is one of them. 9. How to make a study plan?: Now let's assume that you have to create your own study plan and steady schedule. You have certain number of books you need to study from. You have certain number of questions you need to solve, and you should leave some time for reviewing. How do you build your own study plan and study schedule? Let's say you have three books. You need to study from. The first book, let's say it's a 100 pages. The second book is 200 pages, and the third book is 300 pages. And all these books are required for that exam. Let's assume your speed of studying for the first book is around ten pages per day. That means you can finish the first book in ten days. Let's assume that your speed for the second book is around 20 pages a day. Which means you can finish the second book in around ten days as well. Because sometimes books differ in their complexity and the amount of time required per page, that's why your speed might be different per per book. That's why you need to try when you're making your own study plan and schedule, you have to try a few pages from his book. See how much time is generally taking you to study each page or each paragraph. For the third book, Let's say that your speed is ten pages a day, which means you need 30 days of studying for the third book. For the books in general, you need a total of 50 days. To be able to finish all the books, you need a total of 50 days. But remember, these 50 days are just for the first round and you have to leave some time for reviewing these materials as well. However, in addition to books, you have to study question banks. Let's say you have a question bank or represent that by cube. That has around 4 thousand questions and you finish around a 100 questions per day. So that is a total of 40 days. To finish the whole question bank, let's say in addition to the question banks, you have some assessment tools or prior questions of the exam. These are around 1 thousand questions. These are assessment tools. And you finish around 200 questions a day because these might not have explanation and might not need that much time. So that means you can finish these assessment tools in five days. So for both question banks and assessment tools, you need a total of 45 days. And again, these are only for one round of the books and question banks. However, as I said before, it's important to review the information. It's important to review the materials you studied first round. And let's assume that the revision time is half of the actual studying time. That varies a lot based on how good are you with the material, how good how comfortable are you with the notes that you took? If you took notes, what type of notes you took. But this is just a hypothetical situation that it's around half of the time for reviewing. It took 50 days to study the three books, let's say, plus 25 days for reviewing. And let's say here plus 20 days for reviewing because you might not need to review the assessment tools. So to finish the first round of books, you need around 50 days. So we'll put that here. And to finish the first node of question banks, you need around 45 days and you need around five days. Assessment tools. Then for reviewing the box. And we'll represent that with book review. You need around 25 days. And for reviewing the question bank, you need around 20 days. So 50 plus 45 plus five, that's a 100 hundred twenty five hundred forty five days for the overall preparation. That's including the first round of books, first round of question banks, assessment tools, and reviewing the books and the question bags. You might need another round of reviewing the books and question banks that might be sure there might be the same time. So that's how you structure your study plan before you even start, and that you can definitely change it. For example, let's say that you finished this material, the first book, in five days instead of ten days. That means you have extra five days to be using for the second book or the third book or the question back or do more questions and other book. Let's say you took more time for the first book. So it took us 15 days instead of ten days. That means you either need to take time from the other books or you need to extend your exam or maybe not study a book or decrease certain questions. So you have to adjust your schedule based on the time you need. Another situation you might run in this 145 days. You need to do the one round of books, one question, banks and assessment tools might not exist for you. You might only have 120 days for the overall preparation. You don't have extra time, you can extend your exam. So in this case, you have to adjust your studying resources. Maybe you remove this book, maybe you cut on some questions. Maybe you tried to study faster. You have to study more. So instead of studying eight hours, you study 12 hours. And if you change from eight to 12 hours, that's almost 50 per cent increase in productivity because you're adding extra four hours and that's 50 per cent extra productivity. If you finish here ten pages, you'll be able to finish 15 pages if you study 12 hours. A detailed video on how to study 12 hours a day. So adjusting the hours might be a solution in cutting on the resources might be a solution trying to find where the gaps in your studying, where you're having efficiency problems and try to adjust that. But I always recommend if you have to cut on something, don't cut on questions because these are the most important when preparing for an exam. Now after all this explanation, let's say we ended up with 145 days of preparation. You need 145 days. So let's say if you start in January, 145 days is around five months. So you should be doing your exam on June 1st. However, I always recommend having ten or 15 days as a backup plan. Let's say you get sick, you need more time for other resources. Something happens, something unexpected happened. I recommend having these ten, maybe 15 days. So if you are able to, if you have that ability to push your exam, I always recommend having ten days as a buffer. So I would do my exam on June 10th, but I know sometimes students don't have that ability to choose their exam date. And in that case you need to start earlier. So let's say you're supposed to do your exam on May 1st. You need five ones. So go back in time and see how much time you need. Let's say five months in this case, maybe you start by November 20th or maybe December 1st. So you'd predict how much time it requires you to finish these resources. Your exam date is fixed. Let's assume it's fixed. You go back in time and start as early as possible so you can get the materials done in time. Again, think unexpected things happen. You might take more time to go through these the sources, you might take less time. That's why the study schedule and plan needs to be adjusted throughout your preparation. Also, when you're making your study plan and steady schedule, I recommend putting the details of what you're trying to study in each day or each week. For example, if you start studying in January 1st, and we said that the first material would take you ten days. I write from January 1st to January 10th. I'm going to study book one. From January 11 to January 20th. I'm gonna study book too. And you don't have to have a book one, book two, book three, then the question banks. You might have a portion of book one plus portion of book two plus few questions. Then go the next day, study portion of bookworm portion of book two, and then a few questions at night. So you don't have to study one book than the other than the other. Sometimes it might make sense to do that. Book one should come before the other because before book too, because it builds on the information that comes in book two. And the same for the question banks. You want to solve them after you study the books, but you don't have to do that. It depends on what your preferences and what are the materials included in these books and these question marks. But having a detailed idea of when you really start this material, when you, when you finish this material, we will start question banks will help you know, as you go on with your studying that I'm late here, I was supposed to finish this. I need to hurry up more. I need to study more so I can catch up on my original plan. Otherwise, I have to push my exam or have to change the exam or cut off some resources. Because what happens is, let's say you take 15 days instead of ten days, so you finish it on January 15th instead of January 10th, the whole exam will be pushed five days. But if you don't have a steady plants to the schedule, things might not seem real or magnesium clothes when you're five months far from the exam, I still have five months. But when you start putting things in number, putting things in exact days and what you will finish in each day, things will look more real and you will start appreciating how valuable each day is, even five months ahead of the exam. So when you're making your study plan and steady schedule after making this part here, which is how much time does it take to review? How much time does it take to do first-level of the material, open the calendar, and start plugging in these books and these materials on the calendar. So put a date for book three, put a date for question banks. Put a date for review one. You to review of question banks, they view of the books. Also these for the assessment tools. And these could come here. For example, you finished b1, b2, b3 question bank, and you do one assessment tool. Then you do R1, which is revision one. And you do another assessment tool, r2, and then you do another or the third assessment tool. So you can disperse the assessment tools between your first round with you and first division and secondary vision. And again have dates attached to these. So you know, as you go on with your studying that you're following this, do I need to adjust? Do I need to add more resources, decreased resources? Push the exam, do the exam earlier, because in my opinion, that's the only way you can keep track of your progress when you are far away from the exam. Whenever you're preparing for an exam, one of the keys to succeeding in that exam is good preparation. And in order to prepare well, you have to understand how much time you have and how will you invest that time and the different resources available to ace the exam. So that's why it's always recommended to have a study plan or steady schedule that guides you with your preparation when you're preparing for an exam. And that brings us to the end of this lesson about study planners to the scheduled. 10. Have a system: Another tip when it comes to creating a study plan and steady schedule is to create a system of studying. So don't study for 12 hours one day, seven hours the second day, and maybe ten hours the third day tried to create a system of consistency that your brain is expecting, study that amount of time each day. So your brain is in the mood of studying. Also create system for your brakes. So don't take a break one hour and then five-minutes and then two hours, try to have that type of routine, the time of consistency, which helps you achieve things in a predicted weight. I'll go over the details of how you can do your study breaks for how to study for 12 hours the techniques and the best ways to do that in future lessons. But now I just want to focus on the idea of creating a system. Whenever you are creating your study schedule and study plan. 11. Study plan | Solving questions: Now I'll go over some of the common questions that students ask me whenever they are preparing their study schedule or study plan. And the first is, when do we start incorporating questions in our preparation? By questions they are referring to questions that are tested on prior exams. So you'll see some schools are some exam agencies knee release the questions of prior exams. Or you will see preparation materials that tried to create questions that are similar to the exam. But the question is when to start using these resources? In my opinion, you should start using them from day one because you want to have an insight, an idea of how pushes will show on the real exam. So you'll see two types of students. One type that would prefer to study the material from a book or from a course, understand things in a systematic way before jumping on solving questions. And that is totally fine. And the other type would prefer to learn from questions. So they do not like to study from a book or from a video. They would like to be presented with a question, solve the question, and go to the next one because that can help them understand the question in how it's asked format. In my opinion, both ways are valid. But let's say you're someone who likes to learn from a book and then go to the next step and start solving questions. In this case, even in this case, I prefer that you have an idea about the questions. Let's say you have a question, bank of thousand questions, maybe solve 2030 just to have an idea of how the questions are asked. What are they looking for in the questions? And then go and starts to the book or the material that you want to study. Because now you have the insight, you have an idea of how questions look like in the real exam. So whenever you're studying that material, that book, you start studying in a way that can help you answer the exam questions. If you're from the second type of students who like to learn from questions, no problem, you can start directly with the questions. So that's why, in my opinion, crashes are crucial in your preparation and you can start incorporating them from day one. Don't be afraid if you're not solving the questions correctly or you don't know the answers to the question, because the purpose in this stage is not to assist you. The purpose is to learn. So even if you didn't solve the question, but you read the explanation, you were able to understand the question, you learn it, and you go to the next one. Even if you answer the next one wrong, you will learn, read, understand, and now you know it. When you present, you are presented with the same question next time, you have no problem. So even if you don't solve the questions right from the first time, it's totally fine because these question banks are not assessment tools. That is a big difference between assessment tools, which can give you an idea of your score and question bank, which the sole purpose of these is to have you learn about how the questions look like in the real exam and have an idea about that. So even if you don't solve them correctly, it's fine. You don't have to get 90% on the question bank in order to get a good score on the exam. So whatever style you prefer, I recommend you incorporate questions from the beginning to have an idea. You modify your learning based on how the questions are asked. And you'll see different teachers, different professors have different ways of testing students. So you don't want to be studying in a way that doesn't achieve your goal of passing the exam and getting good score on that. That's why again, included on the first stage. But when you're reviewing, you definitely, definitely have to include questions in your preparation. So when I was talking about the first date and the second stage and the third stage. The second stage should include lots of questions solving. You should finish the whole question, but maybe another question back in the review stage, because also the questions remember they can help you review the information. So when you are reviewing the inflammation will talk about the nodes and the flashcards when we go over that topic. But the questions are another way of you reviewing that information. Because if you study one concept from a book and you are asked about that concept now from the question, this is a way of reviewing the inflammation. So that's why you definitely have to include that in your second state and also on your third stage to keep your momentum. Keep your flexibility in solving question before the exam. So again, to answer the question in a simple way, should I incorporate questions in my probation? The answer is definitely yes. When even from the first stage you can start incorporating then even from the first stage, but definitely heavier focus in the second, third stage. 12. Study plan | Assessment tools: Another question I get asked about frequently is assessment tools. Should I do assessment tools? And when assessment tools, if you're not familiar with that, there are a set of questions that can predict your score on the final exam. So let's assume your exam is a 100 questions and the score is percentage. So if you solve 90% of the questions, your score would be 90 per cent. These assessment tools would be similar to the exam, so they would also be a 100 questions. They will be very similar to the exam. If you score 90% on the assessment tools, you're likely to score 90% on the real exam. Not a 100% accurate, but they can give you a very good idea of your score. So that's why assessment tools, in my opinion, are recommended because they can give you an idea about your score. So if you see that you're scoring 99% or 98 per cent, that means you're ready to take exam. You don't need to study more. If you're scoring 30%, 40 percent, that means you need to study more. You need to adjust. You need to do something different to increase your score to the passing grade or your goal of the score. So that's why assessment tools are crucial. And in my opinion, they should be incorporated early. But don't start doing assessment tools before you finished the material. So if your material is a 100 pages and you only finished 50 pages of the material if you do an assessment tool now it's not gonna be accurate because you only have half the information. So it's not surprising if you score 50 per cent because again, you only have 50% of the information. So that's why, in my opinion, you do the assessment tool after the first day. So after you finish your first round of the material, you understand the concepts including in that included in that material, you would go and do your first assessment tool. That assessment tool can give you an idea of your score, but can also track your progress. Because remember, we have a second stage and third stage and that assessment tools can tell you now, now you 40 per cent. Maybe you need to do something different. Let's look at our mistakes in the assessment tool. Is this lack of knowledge, do I need to study more? Do I need do I know this information? But I forgotten because I said it does things like 15 days ago or 30 days ago. So you have to identify what was the problem in these assessment tools. Don't just get a score and study more and then do another assessment tools you have to analyze these assessment strategy. So assessing and tracking your progress on the assessment exams is very important. So that's why you need to ask yourself, why did I made this mistake and go and analyze each one. There are multiple scenarios here. Option one is that you have never read this information, you have no idea about this. There are multiple solutions for that. Either you go and study more, you study more materials, you might have time for that, you might not have time for that. Or Option two, you can say, I'm going to accept the fact that there are some information that I don t know in the exam. And I'm going to go on give my best guess because I don't have time to study more resources. The second scenario is that I know this information, I've read it, but I forgotten. So maybe the division in the second round or the third round can solidify this information. And if you are asked this question again, you'll probably know the answer to this question. If it was a problem of memorization, maybe the review can help solve this problem. The third scenario is that, you know the information, you remember it, but you didn't think about the question correctly. That will come with experience. The solution to this problem will come with experience that, yeah, I know this disease, I know this scenario and I've said it and I remember it, but I did not answer the question in the way that the question was looking for. So that again, will come with time. That's why you need to calculate the percentage of each category, not knowing the inflammation at all, not remembering the information or not thinking correctly. And then with time track how these are changing. Because if there is lack of information and you're studying more and more on, you'll see that this percentage is not moving. Maybe you need to focus more on solving questions. Because the third scenario in which you are not thinking about the question correctly, it doesn't get solved by study, gets sold by sending more questions and solving more questions and thinking in the way that the exam wants you to think. If your problem is mainly like 90% of your mistakes are in the first category where you have not heard of this information. Maybe you need to study more. If it's mainly in the second category, you need to review more. So that's why analyzing Moscow and mistakes on the assessment tool is crucial in improving that score. So first time you do 50 millisecond time, 73rd time, it'd be 90 per cent. So when should we incorporate it? After the first round, you start incorporating assessment tools and then you do one every week, every two weeks, every month based on how much time you have and how many assessment tools are available. So I recommend you do one after the first round and then frequently do want to track your progress and see how you're changing. So again, to answer the question is simple way, should we do assessment tools? Definitely, yes. When you can start the first assessment tool after the first round of the material, after you read the whole material, and then do one frequently to keep track of your progress. 13. Study plan | Final week: Finally, what should I do in the final week or the final day before the exam? Now that you've studied all the materials for big exams, you might have a weak period before the exam. For smaller exams, you might have a day before each exam. What should you do in this final stage, in this final day or final week? You won't have time to review every single thing you study and you also don't want to waste that time. One strategy is to review the notes that you made from your preparation. So you'd only reviewed the high-yield concepts, the concepts that are tested frequently on the exam. In this final stage, other students prefer to do questions so they'll solve questions, questions, questions until they reach the exam day. And that's another great strategy. Some prefer to do assessment tools. So they would keep solving questions that are similar to the exam. And forth type might be combination of all these. So some notes, some things that you feel you might forget because some concepts are hard to remember, especially numbers, different ages. In this case, you might review these ones that you are likely to forget. You would review it the week or the day before the exam. And some students prefer, as I said, a combination of these. They're not things that they have forgotten, questions, assessment tools. And then you can go to the exam. One advice though is that don't stress yourself because the last hour before the exam or the last day before the exam is unlikely to significantly change what your score. Some students get lucky and they get the main question or the essay from that topic days they studied an hour ago. But most likely it's not going to change significantly or outcome that last hour or last day of your preparation. So don't stress yourself too much. It's fine that you study, but don't stay until midnight or very late because you want to cram all this information before you go to the exam. I'll make specific video in this course about the exam day itself. But in general, this final stage make it more of focusing on the high-yield concepts. The concept that are usually forgotten, or a combination of that with questions and assistant tools. That brings us to the end of this discussion about steady schedule, a study plan. 14. Home vs. Library?!: Welcome everyone to this lesson in which we'll be talking about some tips to optimize the productivity for your studying. In this lesson, I'll be going over some of the most commonly asked questions about what you can do to increase productivity during your studying. And from the answers to this question, we will cover all the tips that you need to know to have more productive studying. The first one is what is the optimal setting to optimize your study productivity? And the two most common places that people studying is either home or the library. And we will go over the advantages and disadvantages of using either place. And you can decide what is the optimal thing for you. Let's start with whom. The advantages of studying at home is that you will probably have less distractions from people because you don't have your friends around. There'll be less people at home compared to the library. So the advantage of studying at home is you'd have less distractions from your friends. The disadvantage on the other side for that specific point is that you might have a lot of family members at home. If you're someone who lives with a big family, may be multiple siblings, 345 is not the destruction that you might get from your family, might overweight the advantage of being at home. So you have to look at your situation. You might be someone who's living alone. And in that case, it might be more optimal to study at home because you would have less people to get distracted with. If your library is noisy or there are a lot of people that you might distracted with. The library mightn't be the optimal place for you. So that's why you have to ask yourself, at home, how many people do I have? Do I get distracted by having my data around, by having my mom around brother or sister, etc. So if you have less distractions at home, your home could be a good place to study. The other question that you have to ask yourself whenever you're choosing a **** versus library is how noisy it is, how quiet it is. Some people's houses are very quiet. There might be again, living by themselves or they live with family members, but the family members keep the place they require. They don't turn the TV very loud. Their neighborhood is quiet because sometimes it's the house itself is quiet, but there is noise coming from the neighborhood. So if your house is quiet, it makes it an optimal place to optimize productivity. If your house is noisy, there is so much traffic going on, you can't focus with people sharing, with people. Turning DVR with your neighbor playing music, the house might be not the optimal place for you to study. The third question that you have to ask yourself is, are you someone who get distracted by things at home? For example, do you just go and watch TV if you're at home, you open the fridge is a lot. Some people, wherever they're at home, they can't stop themselves from doing these things. While on the other hand, if they're in the library, therefore, there is no TV there, there is no frieze there. So they don't get distracted by these things. So if you're someone who don't get distracted by TV, fridge, or anything at home. The home might be an optimal place for you. If your home is quiet, you don't have so many people. You don't get distracted by people. You don't get distracted by things at home and the neighborhood is quiet. I personally prefer home IE settings because you won't have other people sitting next to you that you might be chatting with. You might be talking to that we'll discuss now in the library. If you're home or house checks all these criteria, you can choose to study at home. But if you're someone who get distracted by things at home, by people at home, your family members or the neighborhood is not quiet. The house might not be the optimal place for you. On the other hand, the library also has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages is that usually it's quiet. So most libraries have a zone in which nobody is allowed to talk. However, some libraries do not have that zone. And it's very challenging when so many people are talking, talking over the phone, talking to friends to concentrate on your studying if the library is noisy. So the first question that you have to ask yourself about the library, is it quiet? If it's quiet, that's a checkbox. You can go to the next question. Do you get distracted by people around? You might be in the area and you go to that library and you know no one. In that case, it might be good because you won't be distracted by people around. If that library is in your school and old people there are your friends, it might be challenging to study because every time you want to focus, somebody might pass by, you talk to them 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And your whole study schedule is only if you library is quiet. You don't get distracted by friends or they are not friends in this library, they arrived is another ideal place that you can study up. So you have to ask yourself, what is the place in which you get distracted the list? And that will be the ideal place to study. You get distracted, the least by either friends or family member. It's not noisy, so you don't get distracted by noise. And that would be the ideal place for your study. 15. Social distractions: Now let's go on to talk about social distractions, which could be family members or friends. And sometimes you want to spend time with family members or friends. But whenever we're studying, especially for long hours, we find ourselves tending towards getting distracted by these people. If they're not around, that would be better because you'll be more focused on studying. You might pick an hour a day in which you go and spend time with friends or family members. So me personally, I always prefer to study alone, very quiet room. Nobody is in the room because I get distracted by people. So whenever friends are around, I start chatting with them or they chat with me and I can tell them to stop. So it's very hard to tell your friends. I'm sorry, I can't talk to you. I have to continue studying. So in this case, for me personally, I prefer to study by myself. But some people can not study by themselves. They get distracted by everything around them and they prefer to be in a study group. If you are someone who likes to study with people, I recommend small study groups. Don't study in the 20th 30 study. People study group, study with maybe a friend, two friends max three. So don't have large study groups because that increase the possibility of distractions. And the nice thing about the advice I'm giving you is that you can try that. You can try studying at home in the library with friends, with family members and see if it's working for you. If you are someone who is able to study by themselves, perfect, you can continue doing that. If you are someone who is not able to do that, try with one sprint to friends and see if it's working. And you can evaluate yourself as you go on and adjust accordingly. 16. Social media: What do I do with social media and foreign? In my opinion, social media and new phone are the biggest distractions to your studying. So you have to have a very clear strategy on how you are going to deal with these two distractors. In my opinion, for your phone, not only turn it off or put it on an airplane mode, but put it away from you. Because sometimes even if it's on an airplane mode, you can easily, whenever you get bored, you can turn the Wi-Fi on or you can turn it on and you can go back to your distractor. So if you keep it away, sometimes we don't feel that we had the energy to go to the other room to pick our phone and you continue studying. So one tip about your phone, turn it off, or if you are someone who can turn it off, maybe put it on airplane mode, or just keep the phone ringing if you are someone who needs to have that done and put it away from you so you can hear the urgent things that you need from your phone but not have immediate access to it. What about social media, instagram, Facebook, TikTok, in my opinion, you should decrease that as much as possible. Because the moment that you get on social media, the whole algorithm of these social media platforms is to keep you up. So their goal is to keep you on and you get distracted easily, buy things you like. And this is what again, they tried to show you things you like so you can stay on the platform for longer time. So in my opinion, dedicated very specific time for social media. Don't do it between each break because sometimes your break might be five-minutes and the platform got you there for 15 minutes. So use your brakes to be on social media. Use it only during specific times of the day. So you can say after studying for hours, I'm going to spend only five minutes on Facebook. You can adjust if you see that you are someone who cannot spend only five-minutes on Facebook, maybe the activate your account for the timer study. I've seen many students whenever they're studying for a big exam, they deactivate their account because that might be the only solution for you to start getting distracted by that social media platform. What about your computer and Internet? Sometimes or actually most of the times we are studying from our computers and we have immediate access to the Internet and we can go and watch YouTube videos. We can launch these social media apps, facebook and Instagram from our computer. So how do we deal with that? If you are studying with some books, keep your phone, your computer away. If you don't need your computer, keep it away. If you need your computer to search images, to search videos, to show, to search explanation, makes sure that first you turn notifications off. So if you have e-mails and they ring whenever you get an e-mail or whenever you get into vacation or a message from someone on Facebook, turn on notifications off. So you only focus on the reason why you have your computer with you, which is to search for information, not to access your email from your social media platforms. Another tip is to delete the social media apps from your computer and only access it from your phone. So if you have a Facebook app or an Instagram app or a TikTok app on your computer. Delete that, so you only access it from your phone. So whenever you're on your computer for studying reasons, you don't have the option of going and checking these platforms. Always remember, social media platforms are the biggest Emmy for you to stay focused. So try to minimize the time. Maybe keep a log of the number of hours or minutes you spend each day on social media platforms. Sometimes even your phone can calculate that for you and see how that is changing across the day and whether your strategy is working. 17. Have a system!: Another tip for productive studying is having a system. The system of the time you wake up, get up, start studying your breaks. Everything should be a system and you follow it every day. Don't study for two hours a day. And then another day you study ten another day. The third day you studied seven, having the system consistent schedule that you follow. So you bring in a whole body gets in the moon and the routine of your study. And we start, you'll find the perfect balance between how many hours you study, how many hours you sleep, your brakes, how long they take. Don't expect to start studying million hours on the first day. It's like exercise. You don't expect to lift a £100 from the first day. You start with lighter weights and you get heavier as you go in the same way with studying, you start with the minimum you have that your baseline, and then you increase that as you go on. 18. Long studying hours! : Now we'll go over a video in which I will explain how you can study 12 hours a day without burning out, but don't take it as you always have to study 12 hours. Take it as this is a way of setting 12 hours. But if you're someone who doesn't want to see for 12 hours, you can use these studying hours for more breaks. But if you want to study for 12 hours because you're on a very limited time that you need to finish certain number of pages or questions by deadline. This is one way of doing it. 19. How to study 12 hours a day?!: Hey friends, this is malic acid. And in today's video, I'll share with you a few tips on how you can study 12 hours a day without burning out. I use this technique myself when I'm studying for my medical school, for USMLE exams. And today I'll share with you some of these strategies from the moment you wake up, your study, schedule, food, exercise, social life, until the moment you sleep. If you are committing to study 12 hours a day and you sleep between seven to eight hours a day, that will leave you around four to five hours of breaks and breaks for everything, for food, for fun, going out, exercises and breaks between your studying times. So you have to be very committed to your study schedule and have a detailed look of every moment you spend throughout your day. And the first thing I want to start talking about is the wakeup to chair time. And what I mean by wake up the chair time is from the moment you open your eyes till you start studying, how much time do you spend for this process? For some students, it might be half an hour, others it might be hour or two hours. So you have to minimize that amount from the moment you open your eyes till you sit on the chair to start studying, because this is wasted time. You're not doing anything productive during that time. So imagine if you're spending around two to three hours during that period. If you transition that time into studying or breaks are going out, there will be much more fun for me personally. Wake up the chair time is around 20 minutes and I didn't get there the first day I started studying. It evolved over time and it improved over time. So when you start studying, if your time is around two hours, try the next day to decrease it to around hour-and-a-half after week or two weeks starts to decrease it to one hour until you get to around 30 minutes to 20 minutes. If the wakeup to chair time for you as long tried to look at where is this time spend? Are you spending a long time embed from the time you wake up until you get up? Or is it between getting up and having the mood state to sit and start studying? So try to analyse where is that time spent? It might be challenging to get up directly after you wake up, after a few minutes. But try to motivate yourself by saying, if I get up right away after a minute or two from waking up, I can use that time to study or use that time to go out with friends and have fun. Look at the time is spent from the moment you get up until you sit on the chair, how much time do you spend to go wash your face, brush your teeth, may coffee, and try to minimize that time as much as possible. So try to spend a maximum of five minutes from the moment you wake up until you get up around five-minutes to brush your teeth, wash your face, go to the restroom, and around ten minutes to prepare your coffee, prepare your desk, and start studying. Now after you minimize the wakeup to chair time, we have to start looking at the time that you are actually studying. And there are so many studies schedules as studying techniques. The first one is just freestyle. You start studying and when you start feeling bored, you go and take a break. There is no specific time for the break and come back and study until you feel bored and you take another break. The second technique is task-driven. So you'd say to yourself, Oh, it's finished ten pages. And after the ten pages, I would take a five-minute break and then you come back afterwards and you finished another ten pages and you take another break. So your brakes would depend on how much you can finish. If the first ten pages took an hour, you will take your break after an hour. The second ten-page is took two hours. You would stay studying until you finish the second ten pages and you take your break. So it depends on the tasks that you can finish rather than the time it takes to finish that task. The third technique is the Pomodoro technique, in which you decide that I'll be studying for 25 minutes and then I'll take five-minutes break or our study for 50 minutes, and I would take them ten minutes break. There are so many variations of the Pomodoro Technique and the ratio between studying time and number of breaks and length of the break will depend on you. If you're able to sit for long hours without feeling tired and bored, maybe you do two or three hours of studying and then you take ten or 20 minutes break. If you were someone who can get distracted very easily, if they stay for long hours of studying, maybe do the half and our five-minute break and then take another half an hour of studying, ten minutes break. So have more breaks and divide them across the study time. Me personally, I prefer to study for longer time periods without breaks because I can stay focused without feeling bored and taking break every hour or every half an hour with disrupt my thoughts. But if you can stay focused for longer time periods, definitely take breaks, but make them short. If you take very long breaks between your studying times, you, it would be harder to get back to the mood of studying and to the line of thoughts that you had before taking the break. If you're studying for half-an-hour, don't take half an hour break, maybe five-minutes break. If you're studying for an hour, don't take half an hour break afterwards, maybe ten minutes or 15 minutes maximum regarding which technique I prefer when I was studying for my exams. I used to prefer the second technique which is task-driven. It's finished ten pages and then I'll take a break, another ten pages, and then I'll take a break if I'm studying a question bank, for example, you will our study ten questions and then take a break and I decide how many pages, how many questions, by the amount of time it usually takes to finish these questions. Usually I prefer to study for one continuous hour. So if I take an hour for Eastern questions. I'd say to myself, I would finish ten questions. If I can finish 20 questions in one hour, our study 20 questions and then take a break. So I feel that this technique and this strategy helped me stay motivated to finish and then take the break. If I'm using the Pomodoro Technique or motivated to finish the time. But during that time period, during the half an hour or an hour, I'm not supposed to finish certain number of questions, but using the second technique, I'm motivated to finish certain number of questions or certain pages. So productivity in order to get the reward, which is the break these days, I'm using combination of the Pomodoro Technique and the second technique, because sometimes there is variability in the amount of time you need to finish the questions. So if the first ten questions took you an hour to finish, the second thing, questions to q2 hours to finish. Here you start feeling bored and you need the break. So now I use a combination. Sometimes I feel more of studying in the Pomodoro Technique. Other days I liked study in the second technique, which is the task you have to choose imbalance between whatever techniques works best for you and stick with that. But in order to study 12 hours a day, you have to have a very clear idea of how many blocks are you studying? How long does each block class you will the division of your brakes, how long does each break glass? And you have to have that setup in advance. Now let's talk about food when you're studying for exams and you're planning to study for 12 hours a day, it's highly recommended that you avoid heavy meals, meals with high sugar, high-fat, and try to eat very healthy regarding the number of meals and how the meals fit within your schedule? I used to have breakfast in the morning after two or three hours of studying, so I used to take around 20 minutes to have breakfast. And I also use that time to watch TV or talk to family, sit with friends for lunch. I also used to have lunch during one of the breaks between the blocks of studying and also watch movie, watch TV, dinner. You can either go out somewhere and have dinner or at home. You can use that time, the foot time to socialize with people or have fun and watch TV regarding exercise, I believe that it's very important to exercise and stay healthy when you're studying for exams. Something that if you're studying for 12 hours a day, you're not doing anything other than studying and I think that's a misunderstanding. You have to exercise to stay healthy, change the environment, changes the mood, and stay refresh and also have something to look for. If, if exercise is something you enjoy, it would be something to look for when you're studying. Some students like to exercise in the morning, so maybe run for 1015 minutes in the morning. Some prefer to do that at the end of the day. I'm one of those people who feel tired after running. I won't be able to focus a 100% on studying after Iran. So that's why I prefer to do that at the end of the day or maybe in the middle of the day. Some don't feel that they can do that in the beginning of the day and it would be a good way for them to start the day. So they go for around, take a shower and then they start studying. One advice when you're exercising, don't do very, very heavy exercise because that might make you feel tired and you won't be able to focus a 100% on your studying afterwards. Personally, I always preferred cardio overweight when I'm studying for long hours because I feel that weight would drain me physically more than cardio. And I usually work out for around ten to 15 minutes of running every day or every other day when I'm studying for exams. And other misunderstanding is that you have to give up your social life if you're studying for 12 hours a day, I always kept close to my family, my friends when I was studying for 12 hours a day or studying for exams. The trick though, in my opinion, is to limit the number of hours you spend it with your friends or family. So instead of going out for four or five hours, you would go out four hour hour-and-a-half. So this would be enough time for you to change the mood, change the environment, and then come back to studying. However, that requires a very strong-willed because if you are having fun and enjoying your time after an hour, hour-and-a-half, you might say to yourself, Okay, let me stay for two more hours or three more hours. So the trick is not in going out, are not going out. The hard part is to come back to studying after an hour, hour-and-a-half, rather than spending three or four hours hanging out. One tip that works for me is that I use to motivate myself by saying if I come back home now and continue studying, I'll be able to go out tomorrow or after tomorrow. If I stay for three or four more hours, I won't be able to hang out with the rest of the week to try to motivate yourself. Create a system in which you'll be able to come back and study. And you would be able to use that time to hang out more for the rest of the week. Now going to our final point which is sleep, in my opinion, sleep is an extremely important part of you being able to study 12 hours a day consistently. You can definitely not sleep for one or two days and steady 24 hours a day. But after two or three days you burnout and not be able to do that consistently. So the trick of being able to study 12 hours a day consistently for longer time periods is good. Sleep. Studies have shown that sleep is extremely important for retaining information if you're looking to keep this information in your mind after you study it, you have to have good sleep. Studies have shown that students who are sleep-deprived were not able to retain the information as much as those who slept well. For me personally, I never set up an alarm and studying to wake up a specific time period for a meeting or going to school. But when I'm studying, I don't have to wake up at specific time period. I don't set up an alarm. I let my buddy decide when is a good time to wake up. I know that for some students that is not the ideal case because they might sleep for 12 hours or 13 hours. So in this case, you might need an alarm. If you would sleep around seven to eight hours, let your body decide when is a good time to wake up. And now I want to give you some tips for good sleep. The first of which is to keep it consistent sleeping schedule. So don't sleep one day at ten PM, the next day or 3AM, and the third day at 11:00 PM, try to stay within one hour of your sleeping time, and also the same for waking up time. Another tip is to avoid caffeine, alcohol, or heavy meals before you sleep, keep your room cold, dark. Try to use your room only for sleep. So your mind knows that when you go to bed, this is for sleeping and when you're studying somewhere else, this is for studying. And personally, I don't prefer to use sleeping aids and less needed. Try to use something like melatonin. Avoid the heavy sleeping aid because that might make you feel sleepy the next day. I want to finish by saying that studying 12 hours a day is not easy. It does not happen overnight, rather cannot jump from running one kilometer a day to five or ten kilometers the next day. The same for studying. You might start with five hours a day, then go up to 67, try to increase it around 20 minutes to half an hour every week and then increase it the next week and then assess how it's going. If you feel tired, exhausted, maybe go back to the next stage, stay there for three weeks and then increase it by 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and then assess how it's going until you reach the 12 hours a day. I don't recommend jumping directly from five hours or six hours to 12 hours because that will probably lead to burnout and you won't be able to focus for these long hours. Here are the tips that helped me stay focused and be able to study 12 hours a day consistently for several weeks without burning out. 20. Study schedule | 12 hours a day: Let's say you want to study for hours a day. How do you do that schedule? Now I'm going to show you an example of a study schedule in which you can study 12 hours a day if you want to replace that with our little break hours of studying different time breaks that totally up to you. But this is just an example. So let's say you're sleeping for eight hours a day. I'm going here on the higher end from midnight until eight a M. And that's sleeping a total of eight hours. You can definitely sleepless and use that time for breaks or use that time for studying. But let's assume you are on the higher end sleeping eight hours and you wake up at 08:00 AM from eight until 820. That would be waking up. By waking up, I'm in this process of getting our brushing your teeth, maybe grabbing a quick snack before you start studying. So this would be a total of 20 minutes. So after the waking up process, you start studying at eight twin. Let's say you got to take an hour studying and then 1010 minute break. Definitely do a 25-minute studying, five-minutes break, 25-minute studying, five-minutes break, or do a full hour of studying and ten minutes of break. As I said before, you can definitely change that. You can do longer breaks, shorter breaks, but that will adjust the schedule. But this is an example of how we can make it work with still reasonable amount of breaks. So let's say from 820 until 920, you have studying, we replace represent that with S for one hour. And then we have ten minute break here, ten minutes. And we'll represent that with B break. Then we'll start again at 930 until 1030. That's the second hour of studying. So this and one hour. And then you'd get another ten minute break as B. So then it will study from 1040 until 11 for the AM. And that'll be studying another one hour. So now we studied for three hours, we took ten minutes break, ten minutes break. And now we have a longer break. Let's say we're going to take a 40 minute break. Maybe you wanna go grab lunch, have a quick exercise. If you, for example, exercise for 15 minutes, take a shower for ten minutes and eat maybe in 1050 minutes, that would be a nice break. So that would be a bigger brain than the ones before. You would come back at 12th, 20 PM. And then we'll do another hour of studying until 120. And that would be studying for one hour. And then we take ten minutes break, and then we take another hour of studying. From 130 until 230. There'll be studying for one hour and then ten minutes break and then another hour of studying. So from 02:40 PM until 340, be studying for one hour. So after the long break, you realize we took three hours of studying, some kind of trying to divide them in three hours. And then the longer break, three hours, shorter break is in-between and then a longer break. So let's say now we're going to take a 30 minutes break. So in which you can maybe exercise, maybe go out, maybe do something fun. So this would be a 30 minute break. So now we completed six hours of studying, which is half of what we are looking for. So it's 340. We finished six hours of studying. You can see three hours here and three our z and we took longer breaks between each block of a three-hour studying. So now we're going to go for another hour of studying for ten. Now, we're going to study for an hour till 510. So that's S and one hour. And then we're going to take ten minute break. So now it's 520 until 620 and studying for one Our then another ten minute break and now it's 630 until 730. That's studying for another one hour. So these are the third three hours. So now we're at nine hours. We're going to take 30 minutes break in which you can maybe go out now and now it's more of nighttime. You can go for a walk around the house, go out with friends for 30 minutes, and then come back to studying at 08:00 PM and you can study until nine PM. There will be studying for one hour and we take another ten minute break. Then you can come back at 910 until 1010 for another studying one hour, then ten minutes break. And now it's 1020 until 1120 and studying for one hour. And that includes the hours of studying. You'll see here we studied the last three hours, so now we're at 12 hours. Congratulations. You will have from 1120 until 12, which is, we said the time you sleep at midnight, you will have around 40. That equals 40 minutes. Outbreaks. So you can change the 40 minutes. You can maybe finished studying at 1145 and use the break there to another break to maybe have more time to go out. Or if you want to have dinner during the 30 minute break here at 630 to 730 after that block or maybe one of the ten minutes you can extend it to have dinner. So you can definitely adjust these breaks and these studying schedules based on what works for you. But this is how I'm showing you. You can sleep for eight hours a day, ready for 12 hours a day, which is a lot of studying and still have four hours of breaks for hours is still a good time to do something fun. It's definitely not as much fun as they're going out for six or seven hours, but it's still you're still balancing a very good amount of number of hours a day, which is 12, with good amount which is breaks. That is definitely one example. You don't have to follow this example, but this is one example to show, to show you how it works or how you should make your study schedule. You should have an idea of how you'd be spending the time each hour, because otherwise, time we'll just pass by and you would be losing very valuable time for your exam day. If you want to make a study schedule, tried to make it like that. What time you're waking up with time. You sit on the chair to start studying how your brakes will workout. When are you having dinner, when you're having lunch without even going out with friends, it can definitely be adjusted, but makes sure that at least you follow the main outline of this schedule or any other schedule you make. Don't for example, say I'm going to study for 12 hours today and end up studying eight hours if you study for 11 and have that's fine. If you see that you are having much less time in studying than what you plan to try to change the schedule, see what's going on, and try to adjust that accordingly. 21. Understanding: Are you tired of studying things over and over and over again without being able to remember that after a few months, will this is the lesson for you. In this video, we'll go over multiple studying strategies and study techniques that can help you turn more information from the short-term to long-term memory. I'm going to start with an example that is taken from the website of the Mayo Clinic talking about heart attacks, definitely for those into medicine, the heart attack definition and symptoms would be more complicated than this. But I chose this for those who are not in the medical field to be able to understand this, this example, this example is just for demonstration purposes to show you how to study a paragraph. If you are faced with a paragraph about heart attack, how do you go about studying this and repeating and the different techniques that I'll be going over. So I always prefer to explain with an example. That's why we'll go over that example. And then we'll talk about the different techniques I'm going to talk about today. Let's start by reading the overview of the heart attack here. A heart attack occurs when the flow of blood to the heart is black. The blockage is most often a buildup of fat, cholesterol, and other substances which form a plaque in the arteries that feed the heart, coronary arteries. So if you just read this paragraph without being able to understand, it won't help you even if you repeat it a million times. So if you repeat things multiple times, you would be able to recite the words. So if somebody tell you, go ahead and tell me that paragraph again, you might be able to do that. And that might be helpful in exams that as you define heart attack. And you can give them a paragraph about this without you being able to understand that. But most exams these days are turning into the multiple choice questions in which you are required to think about the problem and choose an answer based on your analysis of the question. So if you just decide that paragraph without being able to understand it, it's not going to be helpful. It's not going to get you the score that you're looking for. That's why you need to understand. So the first key to effective studying is being able to understand the parts or the text or the video that you are studying. It might seem common sense. Yeah, of course I'm going to understand, but most students do not do that. They just go over text over words without being able to comprehend the information. So now we'll go back to that same paragraph and explain the topics that are discussed there, especially for those who are not in the medical field and see how it becomes much easier to remember the next time after you read it. So understanding is the key to effective study. So let's go back here to the example. It says a heart attack occurs when the flow of blood to the heart is blocked. So as you know, there is flow to the heart, blood goes to the heart. And if that flow of blood is blocked, this is when the heart attack curves, they're seeing the reason of the black. What could that blockage be? The blockage is most often a buildup of fat, cholesterol and other substances. So these substances, fat cholesterol and others, they form a plague. There's a blockage area and they closed the artery. That's why the heart does not receive blood anymore. They continue, which forms a plague in the arteries that feed the heart. Because the heart receives blood from the whole body and pumps it back to the body after they send it to the lungs. But they are not referring to that type of blood. They referring to the blood that feeds the heart, the arteries that feed the heart, which are called the coronary arteries. If you can see in the picture here, they are these arteries that they have like a small circle around and they tell you, they show you a picture in which there's blockage of the flow of blood to the heart, the arteries that feed the muscles of the heart. And if that blockage occurs, there is no more flow to the heart and the muscle die, and that's why heart attack occurs. So now you see if you read that paragraph again, things make sense. Why? Because I was explaining to you or you read it in a way that it's clear to you now. So for you to remember it, it will be much easier than just reading words that doesn't make any sense. 22. What if I can't understand the topic?: But what if you're not able to understand the topic after reading it? Sometimes it's complicated. And the first answer to this problem is teachers. That's why you enroll in school. You enroll in university and college because there are teachers who are supposed to explain the topic to you before you go ahead and study. So let's try that. I'm going to be your teacher for this specific concept and explain to you over the picture. And let's see how that improves your understanding and ability to understand the concept afterwards. Here we have the picture again, I'm going to point out in black the vessels that serve to bring the blood from the body and then from the heart back of the body. So these are not related to heart attacks. These are the ones that were not interested in at this point. And let's point in blue to the ones that refer to the heart attack. These ones here, as you can see, these are called the coronary arteries. So that's why pictures are very nice because they can explain to you what is not obvious from texts. So you can see here coronary arteries are these vessels that feed the heart. If there is a blockage, as you can see here, blood clot, there is a blockage in the arteries, so the flow comes from here to here. When there is normal, there's blockage. The blood cannot pass by the clot and this area that is fed by the artery here, dice. So you can see here the blood clot is here, which means the blood can pass all the way but stops here. Which means this area does not receive blood. And this area dice. That's why heart attack happens. If we go back to the same paragraph and read it, we can read it with different eyes because now we understand what's happening and you might not need to make any noise because you understand the process. It makes sense. If there's blockage in the area, the area distal to that, the area after that will not receive blood and die. So a heart attack occurs when the flow of blood to the heart is blocked. So as we saw, the clot likes the blood flow. The blockage is a buildup of these materials which form a plague. The one that we saw, the blood clot in the arteries that feed the heart, coronary arteries. These are the names of the arteries. So the first way to effective studying and memorization is actually understanding. So now if you understand this process, you understand that figure, you'll be able to remember the blockage, the area distal to that, it dies and now things make sense. So if somebody asks you what is the reason of a heart attack, you remember that picture and remember the plague that block the flow. And you'll be able to answer the question. So understanding is the first key, but how do you get down to standing either by you reading the texts, if things make sense to you. All Bye. Teacher, tutor. But what if you don't have access to access to a teacher or a tutor and the text was not good enough. What do you do in this case? I highly recommend reaching out to Mr. Google. If you Google heart attack causes or some of the texts included in here, you will be able to identify multiple pictures and they always say one picture explained that 1000 words or maybe million ones. I love pictures. I think they are the best way to learn. That's why if you go and Google the heart attack or the blockage of the coronary arteries, you'll be able to find multiple options and I'll show you now another option is YouTube. So if you type heart attack causes on YouTube or heart attack, coronary artery blockage. Taking some words from here that you couldn't understand, you will find multiple videos on YouTube that can help you explain the idea and help you understand it. But be careful here because time is limited and you don't always have the time to spend three or four hours trying to explain one idea in your materials, especially if your materials is big. So imagine you have a thousand pages, you're not able to understand and you'll have to Google everything that you read. That's gonna be very time-consuming and you might be able to finish the materials on time. And here comes the value of a tutor or a teacher who would be able to explain everything to you without you having to go and look for a single idea. So now let's go to Google to see if we can find something that can help us understand the concept if we didn't have a teacher. So now we're going to go girl got a type heart attack, coronary artery. They give you suggestions now coronary artery bypass surgery, we're not interested in that. We're going to talk coronary artery blockage and use it. So you can see now on the first page you have a completely black or in the other will cause a heart attack because they are explaining to you that if it's fully blind people, it goes on and they can do. They have a picture here directly on the first page. But what if you go to images and you pick the image that explained the concept best you. So maybe we can pick this one here and you can see how the normal flow is. And they show you an open lumen. How when there is no top of this bad cholesterol and other substances, it's blocked here. Even if you didn't have a teacher or a tutor, you might be able to understand from just this simple picture. But what if you are someone who likes to learn from videos? Let's go to YouTube in this case and type the same thing YouTube. And they will show you on the first page of Google suggestions. But I'm gonna go to YouTube itself. So we'll type YouTube here and you will see the different options. I'm sure you know how to search it, but I just wanted to show you how that will look like. So coronary artery disease for example. And you can tag me and next to that. Now you'll see multiple options, 3.5 minutes, 30 minutes. I recommend you use the shorter videos whenever you're searching for a quick concept. But if you listen to a full lecture, that's also an option. But if you don't have much time, listened to the shorter ones and see if they can answer your question. You attend the school lectures. I get asked about this question a lot. Or do I recommend reading the textbook directly without attending the lectures or going to the lectures first and then having to read the textbook. And in my opinion, it depends. If you're able to read the textbook directly, you're able to understand and to understand it fully. And you watched the lecture and it doesn't help you much, then don't do it because you're wasting your time. If the topic is complicated, you're not able to understand and the lecture is helping you didn't do it because you are able to understand. Now, if you're reading the textbook, you're not able to understand, you watch the lecture, you're not able to understand, maybe choose other way. Because if you're doing it and it's not helping you, it's useless. It's waste of time. It depends totally about the lecture. Who is giving you the lecture? Because some teachers are wonderful. And even if you are able to understand the concept, they add a different dimension. They help you understand the concepts more. But if the teacher is not that good and they explain to you, and it's just PowerPoint slides and repeating the same materials and texts. It's a waste of time. I recommend you don't watch the lectures and you go directly and read the textbook, use Google and YouTube for online lecture specifically, one thing I love about that is I can play the lecture double speed. So instead of spending one hour watching when our lecture, you would spend half an hour. So that's an option as well. If you want to go quickly through the lectures, you can put them at x2 or maybe X3 if that's possible, you are able to understand the concepts well with that speed, then go ahead and do it. So to summarize, understanding is the key to learning before you go into any further steps of studying. If you're not able to understand, you won't be able to build on that. So try to make the first goal of studying is to understand, maybe by reading the text one or two times, trying to see the texts on different angles. See the health of your teachers, of your tutors. Look at images. The images are amazingly helpful. Videos are also very helpful. You can look in Google in additional resources your school might provide a new tube and that can help you build good understanding of the topic. 23. Spaced repetition : The second key to effective studying on memorization, and it's more on the memorization side is repetition. Everyone knows that it's not a secret that if you repeat things multiple times, you will be able to remember it. However, repetition without understanding is ineffective, you won't be able to remember things on the long term. If you just repeat words 510 times, you might be able to remember it today and tomorrow or maybe after tomorrow, but not after month. So that strategy depends on your exam. If your exam test maybe three pages and you have two days to study that, yeah, you can do repetition even if you don't understand, you will do the exam. You spilled information on the paper and after the exam you forget everything. But if you are someone who is interested in the long-term knowledge or your exam, this long-term knowledge, because you have 2 thousand pages, you won't be able to do that if you're just repeating things over and over again, once you reach page number thousand, you will forget page number one. And that's why I see people struggle with students always struggle. They repeat and repeat and then they reach pages after a month and they forget everything they study a month ago. One of the key points for effective repetition is understanding the point that we already discussed and we're not going to go over that again. The other key is spaced repetition. You see some people study a page and then after a day they repeat the same page again. And then after three days they repeat the same page while they're studying other things. And then they forget about that page for a month because they didn't have time or they run all the time and they just go to the exam without repeating the information at the end. So Spaced Repetition means that you leave some space from the time you study the information the first time until you review it. Again, there is a whole science and I'm not gonna go into the studies and the evidence behind spaced repetition on, i'll, I'll share with you some books that go more in details of that. But I'm gonna give you the practical information that you need to know from the idea of spaced repetition. Spaced repetition says, for example, if you study information today, you don't have to repeat it tomorrow after 20 minutes because you already know that you already committed that information to the short term memory. If you repeat it after a day or after two days, it's not gonna be hurtful. You already know that. But if you allow your brain to forget that information or have the connections that allow your brain to read the information from the memory, kinda get loose and you repeat it after ten days or a month or two months, disconnection would be way stronger now and the inflammation has turned from short-term to long-term memory. If you repeat the information after 20 minutes after an hour after day, it's still short term. But if you repeated much time afterwards, maybe two weeks, a month or two, that changes the information from short-term to long-term. That's why I recommend you review the material after you've finished material. Don't study one page and then reviewing the next day, study on page, go to the next, maybe finish the whole book and then review everything again. Another way of doing the space repetition is through the Anki deck cards or similar apps that show you questions at different intervals. For example, if you study the paragraph and you put it as a question in one of these apps, and you say you solve it for the first time, and you say this is very difficult. It shows you the discussion more often than the ones that you point as easy. So you'd be able to see these questions more often. You'd be able to review them multiple times. But again, it doesn't show you all the questions the next day. It might show you a question after week after two, and there is a whole algorithm behind it. Personally, I've been using the AC method a lot. It's very good. It's highly recommended, but I haven't been using it. I usually try to review the inflammation after I finished the material. And the reason why I like doing that is because once you review the whole material, now you have the big picture of the subject. For example, if I'm studying cardiology now I know everything about cardiology or at least I went once through the whole system. When I review it. Again, things make more sense because you have a much more insight into the topic, into different angles or how things show. And once I reviewed, again, it's going to be much more understanding and more knowledge I get from reviewing the material. And it also satisfies the idea or the concept or the goal of space repetition is that you study and then you leave some time, and then you go back to review the subject after some time passes to change that memory from short-term to long-term. 24. What is high yield?: Another concept about repetition is that you don't have to review the whole material. You may be review only the important thing is the high-yield thing, the things that are likely to show on the exam. And how do you get that by getting experience with the subject. That's why I can go through the whole material. I saw some questions. I know what things are important, what things are showing more. And then when I review it, I only focused on the high-yield concepts. And we'll also discuss how to make notes and maybe you can review only your notes. You don't have to review a thousand pages. Maybe you review your notes or 100 pages, and that reduces significantly the amount of information that you need to study. So one of the other keys to repetition is that you don't need to repeat things that are easy or don't show in the exam that often you focus more on the things that make a difference in new answering the question versus not. And also the things that are likely to show on the exam. So we won't waste so much time and things that are low yield or have low chance of showing on your exam. We're going to use an example from the same page that we've been looking at the heart attack. Let's scroll down to symptoms as read, common heart attack signs and symptoms include pressure, tightness, pain, squeezing, aching sensation. So generally uncomfortable sensation can be paid. Pressure in your chest, arms, neck, jaw, and back. The other symptoms, nausea and digestion, heartburn, abdominal pain, GI symptoms, gastrointestinal tract symptoms, shortness of breath, cold sweats, fatigue, lightheadedness, or sudden dizziness. If you try to memorize all these things can be extremely challenging. To be more effective in your studying, you would focus on the things that would make you identify a heart attack or not. If you're asked about like list of symptoms and you need to make sure that this is heart attack or no. You need to focus on one or two because all the other symptoms can maybe show like GI infection. If you have like a bug in your stomach that might cause nausea and heartburn, abdominal pain, if you like running, you might get shortness of breath. So that's why when you're ready, we're studying, you need to figure out what is important and what is not. What makes a difference in new, ruling out a disease or ruling out an answer or not. And in my opinion, for this for this list is the first one. This uncomfortable sensation in your chest. Whether it's paying, paying, tightness, squeezing, aching, chest, arms, neck, jaw, back. So imagine, so imagine the distribution of that and remember this is what defines a heart attack. All the other symptoms could be there, but they're mainly symptoms of other diseases as well, which makes it hard to differentiate a heart attack based on nausea and heartburn and shortness of breath. So the thing that would make you suspect a heart attack or makes you go more towards the heart attack is the first one. The other symptoms could be there, could not be there. But the main one that you are more likely to be asked about is the first one. Some might ask, how do I know that the first one is the one that differentiates heart attack or makes it more likely to suspect times a day. And that depends on your knowledge or your teacher or tutor. All the other things that I've been talking about in class, your teacher told you, this is the one that makes a difference. This is the most important one that you need to focus on. When you repeat and review, you would focus mainly on this ad, maybe glass and the others, or maybe not even include them in your notes. So that's why I recommend knowing what is high yield, either from the help of tutor or by use all the questions. So once you solve questions and we'll talk about that later, you can figure it out. Now, the question mainly focused on that symptom in the explanation, they focus mainly on that symptom, differentiate a heart attack or not. So when you go back and review, you emphasize on the high-yield concepts. Not everything because your books thousands of pages, but the important ones, the ones that you need to repeat, are much less than the whole material. So to summarize what we've talked about for repetition, first, repetition without understanding is ineffective. Always repeat with understanding. Do is spaced repetition. Don't review the page that we just studied an hour later or the next day. Give it some time, allow your brain to forget it, and then review it again. A third, emphasizing your repetition on the highest concepts, the concepts that are more likely to show in the exam one and number two, the ones that differentiates option a, option B, option C. 25. Mnemonics: Now let's talk about mnemonics. Mnemonics are a memory technique that can help you increase your recall of information. Instead of studying and long list of items, you remember only one word and each letter from this word stands for the beginning of one of these items, or maybe the middle of this item. Or maybe you have a sentence that, that rhymes or make sense. And the beginning of each word stands for one of these items. Now let's go over some examples of mnemonics. Roy G Biv is a common mnemonics for remembering the rainbow colors. So I'm sure you know that there is, there is orange, there is blue, the order of which you might not be able to remember easily. So if you remember the word Roy, G, Biv, you'd be able to remember the rainbow colors because the R stands for the rent. The O stands for the orange, Y stands for the yellow, G stands for green, B for blue, I for indigo and violet. Instead of having to remember seventh items in that specific order, which is challenging, you can memorize the word Roy G Biv. Every recall the order. You can remember O R stands for right, the Y stands for yellow. And you can remember that order. The thing is, our memory tricks us that, Oh, it's easy. We can remember the order and you study them once and you might be able to remember it for five minutes. But if I asked you about that after month, it's unlikely that you'll be able to remember that order correctly. That's why mnemonic is one of the techniques that can help you remember things much faster and for a long term goal. Now let's go over at least on medical mnemonics. Here I open the Wikipedia page of list of medical pneumonic. I'll scroll down. You will find different types of mnemonics. Mnemonics that makes sense. For example, I'll show you here. Little boys preferred toys. This sentence makes sense. Little boys preferred toys. So it's easier for you to remember it. And now you remember that the beginning of each word stands for one of the anesthetic agents. So the l starts for lidocaine. The B stands for the bupivacaine, the P stands for the procaine and the T stands for the tetracaine. Instead of having to remember all these four items. Or you might remember one or two. You might remember the sentence, little boys preferred toys. And you'll be able to recall the order or these anesthetic agents. Another one that makes sense, for example here is def, always bring great acceptance. This sentence, it's easier to, it's easy to remember it together because it makes sense. It's a sentence that always brings great acceptance. You might not agree with the idea that it brings great acceptance, but just take it for the idea of the marks here. This is explaining the stages of people accepting that. Because whenever somebody dies that we know, we go through stages and this is one of the psychological concepts. Whenever you study psychiatry or psychology, you go through denial. Then you are angry, then you bargain, and then you grieve, and then you accept, or whenever you, you're faced with a disease, you also deny that you're having a Z is you get angry, then you say, Oh, if I stopped smoking, I'll not have lung cancer anymore, then you feel sad and accept that fact. It might be easy to understand these things make sense, but to remember them in that specific order might not be easy. So you might create a pneumonic dab job. For example, dab gel, which stands for the width, brings the first letter of each of these. But this NetJets, does it make any sense? Like you might remember it like we remember Roy G. Biv, but this doesn't make any sense, but you'd remember it for the purpose of that specific example, the stages of dying. But this might be easier to remember if you remember a sentence that always been great acceptance. So you will see two main types of mnemonics. The one that makes sense or a word that is linked to the idea because he brings great acceptance. It's linked to the idea of dying, accepting dying, and also gives you an idea of how these stages are. But Roy G Biv might not make sense. You just to memorize it for the sake of it, and then you turn the words. So the two main types are the ones that are linked to the idea which I prefer if you can find something like that, that can be linked to the topic that you are studying. And you can also give you an idea about the items that will be the best if you can't find one or the texts that you are setting is not provided you with one. You can study like likelihood Jiu Bu, where each level and gives you the beginning of one of the words and then you can remember the order like that. An example of that here is this depression characteristics. There are criteria that you need to meet to be diagnosed with depression. This is the less sleep disturbance, psychomotor retardation, appetite, concentration, energy depressed in dread, guilt as recital tendencies. It might be hard to remember all of these after I do once or twice, or maybe even after you study it, you might be able to remember it for a day or two, or maybe three or four of the nine items. But it's unlikely that you'll be able to remember the nine of them. To remember the nine of them, you might make a pneumonic space. This space is not related to depression. There is no connection between space digs and depression, but you just memorize for the sake of depression, you recall in your mind and repeated multiple times, you might write it on the paper and look at it every day. That space is connected to depression. And then you remember at the beginning of each of these items, that stands for one of the leaders in space sticks. So the one is our very helpful if you are someone who's interested in keeping the information more on the long-term side rather than the short term, you will find some of the books that you are studying might provide you with mnemonics to make your studying easier, but sometimes they don't. In this case, you create your own life. You create words that make sense to you, or sentences that make studying so much easier for some students might say, it takes time to create my x and I agree it does, but it saves you much time later. So instead of studying that paragraph ten times until you ace it, you might create an Molich, spend few minutes on that, and then you repeat it two times and it's going to be long term because now information are connected. So mnemonics and investment, and I highly recommend doing it if your exam tests long-term knowledge. 26. The memory palace: Another very cool memory hat is memory palaces. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that concept, but for those who are not, It's another memory technique that can help you retain information more on the long-term. So imagine you are studying, I'll give you an example of a memory palace. Now, imagined as you are studying, you place these items that you are studying inside your house. If your house has a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and the bathroom, you place these items inside your house and imagine that you are walking inside your house and seeing these items on the shelf, on the sofa, on the fridge, on the oven. And now it's an image. It's not a text anymore. That can help you remember these information on the long-term way more than if you're just reading texts. Because our brains are designed or evolved to remember images more than text. That's why we learn much more with images. So if you change the text into different items that you can place in different places inside your house or inside your relative house or friend's house, or inside your school, there are a ton of places that you know and are familiar to you that you can use for the purpose of a memory palace. Now let's try to put the risk factors of the heart attack of the page that we've been reading into a memory palace and give you an idea of how that looks like. If we scroll down to the risk factors and we see age, tobacco, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, which represent being obese and having high blood pressure, high blood sugar, having a family history, lack of physical activity, stress, illicit drug use, history of preeclampsia, which is disease related to pregnancy and auto immune diseases. If this is a very long list of risk factors and it's unlikely that you'll be able to remember it if you just read the texts. So one way of changing this into a memory palace is imagine your grandma sitting on the sofa in your living room because it's age. So now I convicted that idea to my grandma. Imagine your grandma holding cigarette to represent smoking. And all other hand, there is the cuff of measuring blood pressure because she wants to measure her blood pressure and she's eating. The cholesterol is high and she's obese and having diabetes because eating so much sugar, so much fatty food increases your chance of having high cholesterol, obesity, and diabetes. So now you have an image. I want you to close your eyes and imagine that image. Not just say, Oh, I imagine that. Imagine your grandmother sitting on the sofa in your living room smoking cigarette, having the blood pressure cuff on her other hand, eating which will present obey obesity, high cholesterol and diabetes, and also metabolic syndrome because it stands for dress. And she's also fairly she's one of your family members. So that stands for the family history because she's sitting on the sofa, she's not moving. So that's the lack of physical activity. Now we represented almost more than half of the risk factors in one single image. Your grandma, again, repeat the image yourself and imagine it. Don't just say to yourself, close your eyes. Imagine your grandma holding a cigarette in one hand, blood pressure cuff on the other hand, eating. And she's one of your family members and she's not moving. That's why the lack of physical activity she's on the sofa to represent last fall, I'm gonna pick your grandfather who's sitting in the kitchen. He's a stressed and using drugs. I'm not saying that your grandfather is using gloves, but just imagining imagine it for the sake of remembering. And sometimes when you create funny things like that, it's easier actually to remember it if you laugh about it, easier to remember it. So again, close your eyes. Grandmother is in your living room. Your grandfather is stressed. And using drugs and the pre-eclampsia, you can imagine it by a pregnant woman. So imagine your sister or your mother is also in the kitchen talking to your grandfather and she's pregnant and having an autoimmune disease. So she's scratching her arm or doing something that represent an autoimmune disease for you. So here you can see your metal arthritis. Actually we can have your grandfather having knee pain because of rheumatoid arthritis or having had been because of rheumatoid arthritis and that will present an auto-immune disease. So your grandmother is on the sofa in the living room and your grandfather is stressed using drugs, complaining of hand and knee pain because of the arthritis, is having these arguing with you or mother or sister who is pregnant. So in this case, we turn this very long list of items of risk factors into three people located in our memory palace, which is our house. The grandmother on the sofa, the grandfather and the mother, and the kitchen. Doing the things that we'll be talking about that makes it much easier to remember next time. Again, the illusion of learning is that it makes you feel that you know, you remember, but you remember it only maybe for the next 510 minutes. But drawing it into images, laughing about it. Maybe saying it out loud can help you change that information from short-term to long-term memory palace is another memory investment. It might take you a minute or two to imagine all these images, but it definitely can save you time on the long term if your exam tests, lot of knowledge. 27. Active vs. passive learning : Now let's talk about the difference between active and passive learning. Passive learning is the most common one that you encounter in school. When people study, you sit in a lecture, you listen, you don't get involved. You don't ask the questions the same when you're sitting reading a book, you just read and read and read without summarizing that information, without answering questions, active learning has been proven to be better than passive learning, especially for long term memorization. So if you want to retain information on the long term, you have to be actively involved. So don't just sit in a lecture, don't just read a book without being actively involved. Some might ask, how do I become an active learner? There are multiple techniques to do that. The first one is summarizing. So imagine that you are studying by yourself, you reading, which is passive learning. And then you summarize that information through a text. You summarize that big texts. We'll talk about that, how we do that in the notes into maybe two sentences or three sentences. Are you summarize that big texts into a flowchart. So think slit from one to another, or you summarize that into a table or maybe a figure. You draw the figure on different arrows representing different things. So you're summarizing the information you will becoming an active learner. Because that also involved the act of retrieval. Because whenever you absorb information you're taking you're taking that inflammation. But we're not sure what's happening with that information. Whenever you're summarizing, you retrieving it from your brain, you're retrieving it from the synapses and producing it in a way which is the summer summary of that text, which is the table or the figure of the graph wherever you like. And as I said, we will go over the details of how to make notes and you're studying. But remember now, to be an active learner, you need to kind of summarize that information retrieved again from your brain, even if it's just learned that that can help you also create nodes on the long-term. The second way that you can become an active learner is teaching. If you teach that information to someone else or even to yourself, that is an active way of learning and that's also an act of retrieval. So why is that an active retrieval? Because you're taking all the information that you got from that resource, from that material, from that book, from that lecture. And you're seeing it in your own words. Now you're emphasizing what is important, what is not. You are remembering this and giving it to someone else. And if you're by yourself, teach yourself. Some might ask, how do I teach myself? Just imagine yourself in a lecture and you're teaching or giving a lecture about that topic, are you able to assign that information? And I see some students whenever they are studying. I finished up the pages a day. I asked that student, how can you finish a 100 pages a day? How fast are you reading? It turns out that this person just reading the information without actually understanding it, without actually remembering it. Sometimes you might understand the concepts, but he's not able to summarize it, to teach it to someone else. So I told that students don't go to the next page until you are able to teach me or teach yourself or teach someone that inflammation present in the first video to study. And that dramatically changed the way that he is studying and the way he's scoring because he was just running over the information, not storing well on the assessment tools whenever. Now he became an active learner. Not just a passive learner, than just reading the information, actually summarizing it and presenting it to an imaginary audience. Now he's involving the act of retrieval and he's becoming an active learner, hence, long-term memory. One problem with just reading information or sitting in a lecture for hours is the illusion of learning. We get the illusion that we know the information, but in reality we do not. We cannot retrieve that information from our brains. Maybe it's sitting somewhere in one of the synapses in our neurons. But we are not able to get that information to answer the question. That's why if you become an active learner, you involve the act of retrieval through some rising through teaching, you'll be able to remember this information more, answer the questions more and turn that information into long-term memory, which is what you need almost exactly. 28. Solving questions | Act of retrieval and spaced repetition : Another very important techniques and might be the most important one to become an active learner is solving questions. The more questions you solve, the better learner you become. That because you're just solving the questions in the style of the exam test. Because solving questions remove the illusion of learning from the equation. Because the problem with illusion of learning is that you read pages. You're familiar with this maybe because you wouldn't need two days ago, a month ago. So you feel that you actually know, but we can start that exam and I ask you a question. You're not able to know because you read the information, you feel this these pages are familiar, that picture it looks familiar. But when I asked you, you're not able to answer. That's why questions. Put that to test. If you remember the information, you will be able to answer the question. If you don't, you involve these synapses around the brain. You evolved different neurons, even if you failed retrieving the inflammation. Once you eat the asset, you'll be able to remember it more if you made your brain work, try to search out for that information. Try to find it. Even if you fail, that's better than this is the answer. So that's why solving questions is very important to become an active learner and change the information from a short-term, one Long-term mode. And it's another very important techniques to have the act of retrieval working. There are different ways to create questions. You might use an already available Question Bank and solve that question bank create nodes from that. Or you might create your own question deck or question bank. Because for example, when we were reading about the symptoms of a heart attack, of a heart attack, you can write in a notebook or in a Anki deck, what are the symptoms of a heart attack? And when you read that question, now your brain tries to remember the information. So don't look at the acid before you try to exert yourself to search with that information. And then you flip the page or you read the answers and see, okay, these are the symptoms I guess for all five. Now I remember the FIFO more. So that's how you create your own question bank by dividing the subject that you're studying or the topic that you are studying. Two small pieces. Don't write on the question. Talk about heart attack. That's very broad. That doesn't help your brain a lot. Try to divide into things that make sense. For example, what is the cause of heart attack? What are the symptoms of a heart attack? What are the risk factors for heart attack treatment diagnosis? So divide that topic into small pieces that make sense. So whenever you're reading this, there is a specific answer to that question. You try to remember it. If you succeeded, perfect. If not, you read, you learn, and you go forward and that act of retrieval, trying to remember the information helps the inflammation stay more in the long term memory. One cool thing about question banks or question next, in addition to the idea of active retrieval, is that you can use them in that time. So sometimes it's hard to read the whole paragraph or maybe like a new topic While you're sitting in the bars, while you're sitting in the car or doing an activity that doesn't involve your brain a lot, but it's easier to go over questions. So you might be in the bus waiting for an hour to arrive somewhere and you read, what are the symptoms of heart attack? You think about it, you read the answer and you go forward, next one and until you reach the end of your question. But that's why use that date time in your life to fill it with questions. And whenever you have more time sitting by her desk, you can read the paragraphs, the topics, the books that you are selling from. And that helps combine both the act of retrieval and the passive learning. Since we are talking about questions now I'll go over some of the common asked questions from students that I tutor. The first one, should I start solving questions now or later? So whenever you are studying materials, sometimes there are these books that you study from and there are questions of prior exams or questions, Question Banks of suggested materials that you can study from. Should you start these questions at the same time, you're sitting in the book or later on and there is no one correct or wrong answer. In my opinion, it can help if you study the questions at the same time. So for example, your study topic and then you solve the questions so you know what is important, what is not, but other strategies that you've finished the whole book. You get a good idea about the subject, and then you go and solve the whole question bank. So these are two acceptable ways of doing this. If you are a person who likes to read the whole book, Have a good idea about the subject before they go and jump in the questions, that is fine. Or if you are someone who likes to read something and then test themselves, That's also active retrieval. But remember, even if you try the first one in which you will do the whole book and then you will. That's still active retrieval. It's delayed at active retrieval actually, it combines both the space repetition and active retrieval. Why? Because spaced repetition you studied that idea may be the cause of heart attack last month. And now through the question bank or through the question, you're asking yourself, what are the causes of our data? So now you did spaced repetition and you did act of retrieval. So it doesn't help you a lot if you study the cause of a heart attack and then you answer the cause of a heart attack from your question back after an hour. But if the question bank presents the information in different ways, that might be helpful to know how the questions are asked. So I always recommend solving some cushions whenever you're splitting a book just to know what is important, what is not, how the questions are present to guide your studying through the book. But definitely, definitely you need to do the question back at some time, either after you finished the resource or at the same time. Another question I get asked about for questions is, how much should I study from the question? But you will see whenever you create your own dequeued, have a question and answer. So that's simple. You read the question and the answer. But sometimes these Question Banks presented with a question in big explanation, explanation of the wrong choices, and maybe a summary of the question. In my opinion, all of these are important. Even the explanation to the wrong choices is important. Why? Because it can help you differentiate things. So imagine that they give you because of a heart attack and they give you five choices. Three of them are definitely wrong, but you confuse between 21. That was more important than the other. For example, the chest pain and nausea, which is both are symptoms of a heart attack, but one is more indicative or one is more important than the other. So if you read both and say, Oh, both are correct, I'm going to pick chest pain but I'm not sure why nausea is wrong. And you go forward without knowing why nausea is not the correct answer here is not very helpful because you might get confused in the exam. But if you go and read the explanation that nausea is correctly is a symptom of could be a symptom of a heart attack. But just being here is more important. And we asked about the best or the most indicative of a heart attack. In that case, you say, okay, now I know if I get chest pain with something less common or less indicative, I should just me. So that's why an explanation of their own choices is very important. Differently, the ones that you are confused between. Sometimes they might present you something that you are not aware of, like you use it. This is definitely wrong, but it was not different theorem. It was possibly correct answer. But it was not the answer in that case because 123. So that's why I recommend reading the wrong choice because it can help you control the information. Sometimes we learn binomial, like this causes this. But if you add that this does not cause this, this can help you now start contrasting the inflammation, knowing what not to pick on the exam. Another way I used to involve the act of retrieval whenever I'm sending, even when they're reading a book is I cover things with my hand. Now I see they're talking about that specific disease. I asked my cover with my hand, the textbook and I asked myself, what were the causes of this that involves the act of retrieval. Now I'm trying to remember the causes of that disease and then I show myself the answer. That's correct. That's not go forward. Don't just read because as I said, if you just read, It's illusion of learning. Tried to cover with a deck, with your hand, with whatever you have to involve your brain and become an active learner, not just reading texts. 29. Active learning | Final tips : My final tip for effective studying before I end this video is, don't be an OCD for those who are not familiar with obsessive compulsive disorder, it's a disease that makes you repeat certain actions, certain words to satisfy in general, you'll see these people who wash their hands think times because they are afraid of germs or they check the door maybe ten times, although the lactate from the first time. So it's just repetition, repetition, repetition, wasting time without actually having value. So if you becoming an OCD with studying, how does that translate into study? Let's say you're studying the causes of a heart attack and you study it once you understand it, and now it should go forward. Next idea, but you repeat it second time, third time, fourth time. These repetitions are not helping you because they don't follow the idea of spaced repetition because you have to leave some time between the first time you read the material and the second time you review it. And it also doesn't fall in the idea of understanding because you already understand the concepts. So there is no point of view reviewing the information four or five times. And this, this could be destructive to a student's study. If you repeat it five times, the same information, you already know that in the same hour. Why are you doing this? You're wasting reviewing that information five times in the future, which is way more important. You are decreasing the amount of time that you have for the other materials. Remember that most of our exams, this large amount of information. So if you get to do that for every piece, you won't have time for the rest. So that's why Don't be an OCD while studying. Make sure that you understand the concepts and go forward. Sometimes there is this urge inside us that force us. Okay, Let's see it one more time. Let's read one more time. No, don't do that. Just cover it. Recite it to yourself. Try to teach yourself or someone else. Answer a question about it and if it's good, go forward. Don't repeat it multiple, multiple times. If you still feel uncomfortable, I'm going to forget this in the future. If I don't repeat it in time, It's fine. Put it into a knot in the future. Once you come to it, you can read it. This can solve a huge problem for a small group of students who will become a senior whenever their study. Yes, it's fine if you don't feel comfortable with it now, just put it in the note and tell yourself, we're going to come back to this next month. So you're not throwing it away. It's in the notes, but we're not going to satisfy that urged of sending it ten times. We're just going to leave it in the notes. And next month, next month, we'll be reviewing this. The concepts that we just discussed about the idea of active versus passive learning might be one of the most important thing in this whole course. So if you wanted to take a home message from this whole course, the idea of active learning through summarizing the information, presenting it in your own way by teaching yourself or others, solving as many questions as possible. That involves all these steps, involve the act of retrieval. You try to search the information. And if you do it with the idea of spaced repetition, that will boost the information available in your long-term memory. And that brings us to the end of this lesson, about 30 techniques and memory hacks. 30. Time ⏰: Solving Strategies, very important topic whenever we are discussing getting a good score and your exam, I've heard of numerous cases of Einaudi information. I've stated very hard. I reviewed multiple times, but I can get a good score on the exam. And that is because you don't have good questions solving strategy. In this lesson, we'll go over multiple techniques that can help you get the grade score and the right asset on your exam. The first thing that you need to take into consideration whenever you're building your soul. Questions solving strategy is the type. How much time do you have for each question? Because you'll see some exams in which you have, for example, one hour for 60 questions. Some exams you have when our 44 equations, sometimes you have two hours for 200 questions. So how much time do you have for each question? Sometimes that type is very efficient and you can do everything you want. Read the question multiple times, the answers, but sometimes it's not. So the idea of how much time you have for each question will decide how you deal with the next concepts that we'll be discussing throughout the rest of this lesson. There are different types of exams. Some of these give you, for example, 60 minutes or one hour for around, let's say five questions. And you would write essays, so you'd write long paragraphs. So you'd have more than enough time to read the question, maybe 50 times, 60 times because there are only five questions. But if you have multiple choice questions, these MCQ exams, you generally have more questions. You might have around 60 minutes to solve around 60 questions, and that leaves around one minute per question. You'd see other scenarios. For example, the USMLE exams I did. They have seven to eight blocks. Each block would have for the questions that you need to solve in 60 minutes. So that leaves around 1.5 minutes per question. So that means you don't have time to read the question five or six times because you only have a minute or a minute and a half per question. You have to be very careful about how much time you have per question. So as we saw in the scenario of 60 questions in one hour, you have one minute per question. So if you spend, for example, 30 minutes on 20 questions, that means you're late because you're supposed to finish 30 questions in the first 30 minutes. So you will need to see how you're doing with time throughout your exam. And that's a very important question solving strategy that you need to develop early on in your preparation. If you feel that you are someone who's not getting the questions right in the time allowed on the exam. You have to speed things up. A little talk about now the strategy that you can use to speed things up. But that's why it's very important to practice questions early on. If you're feeling that you're solving 20 questions is still fairly quickly. Per half an hour, maybe you need to develop a different strategy. If you're solving questions faster, that's great. You can use the extra time to read the questions more, maybe review the questions. But if you're short on time, you have developed some strategies to speed things up. And how can you tell most of these exams will have either o'clock somewhere or they would give you a timer at the end. So you have to see based on how the exam is going, are you on the same speed if you're supposed to finish 40 questions an hour, that means in the first half an hour, we're supposed to finish 20 questions. If you finish the first 15 minutes, that means you're supposed to finish take questions. So based on this minute per question, you have to evaluate yourself throughout the exam. I myself was in the exam one day. We had 40 questions for the hour, which means I had to finish 20 questions in the first half an hour. After the first half an hour past it was 30 minutes. I can see that on the timer. I was only 18 questions. So you had to finish things faster. I had to rush because if I continue with the same rate out, finish 36 questions in the hour and I will miss four questions. Four questions that might be easier than I can answer very easily. So that's why, again, you have to evaluate yourself throughout the exam. That's a very important question solving strategy. 31. Reading choices first!: Another debate when it comes to solving questions on the exam, again, for multiple choice questions, are you supposed to read the answers before you read the question or not? That's a double-edged sword. Because if you don't read the answers before you read the question, you might not know what the question is about. So especially for long questions that are 1020 lines you're reading and reading and you don't know what they're looking for. But if you read the answers quickly, you might have an idea. Okay, This discussion is about biology, this question is about chemistry. And now you can get oriented to look for a specific type of information. On the other hand, the disadvantage of reading the answers is that you might be skewed towards that you read first without reading the question. In my opinion, there's advantages and disadvantages to each but me personally, especially for exams that cover a wide range of topics. I find it helpful to screen, not really screen the answers very quickly to have an idea of what the topic is about. And I'll show you now that for example, we can see if we read the answers first, we go to the question again and see how that can work for us. So here we'll see an example of a question. In my opinion, if you go, You have no idea what the question is about. So you can either read all these lines on the question and then start to wonder what the question is about. Or you can screen the acids very quickly to have an idea of what this question is about. So by scanning, especially look here for the answers there long. So if you spend so much time trying to screen these answers, it would take so much time and you might not finish the questions in each block of time. That's why I recommend screening. So he gives the patient blood despite the patient refusal. I stop here. I don't continue because this is an emergency and stuff stuff because now I'm not trying to choose the answer. I'm trying to screen to get an idea of what is the topic of discussion. Another advantage of reading the answers before you read the question is that it can help you navigate the question. So now you know what they're asking about and you start creating the differential for choosing a versus B versus C, the Vs e based on preconceived idea of the question. That might be hurtful sometimes, but in my opinion, if you master it, if you train about that before the exam, since day one of your preparation, it's going to help you. So here, if I'm screening, I'm just going to highlight the areas I would look at. This whole screening process should not take more than 23 seconds. So don't spend too much time on it. Give the patient blood. This is my eyes looking at this very quickly. As the wife, as the hospital respect the patient, explained to the patient that literally if I'm not talking, I have not pronouncing these words. It would take me three max, four seconds to read these few words. So now I have an idea there is some behavioral, ethical question about giving patient blood. Are you allowed to respect the patient wears or you have to give him or her blood as the wife or explain to the patient. So now I have an idea that I should be looking for information of whether I should allow something to happen or I have to ask them for getting blood. It's about something related to give them blood. So now when I read the question, I can go faster in the areas that does not relate to this topic. Because if you start reading, I'll show you now, you might be lost in what should you be looking for because there'll be presenting you with multiple inflammation. The question is short. Maybe if it's one or two lines, go ahead and read the question is fine. It's not going to make a difference because only two lines. But for things like this where you have very long question, they long answers, it might be helpful to screen the answers very quickly, again, very quickly before you go and read the question. 32. Should I read the full question?: The second debate is whether to read the full question. Some students read the question from beginning to end and they read the answers and then they make a choice. However, that does not always work for question four exams that you have very few minutes for each question. So again, if you have five minutes for a two-line question, yeah, you can go ahead and read from a to Z, from the beginning to end, read the answers are the choices and then make a choice of what is the correct answer. But for exams in which you have 20 lines of of the question and multiple lines for the answers, and you only have one need to do that. You can barely read the question. You need to develop some strategies to speed things up. Again, if you're comfortable, comfortable reading from beginning to end with no rushing time, do it. That's totally fine. But if you're trying to speed things up because you don't have enough time. This is one way of doing it. So if you want to read the question from beginning to end, totally fine if it's short or if you have time. But if you don't, I do not recommend reading from beginning to end. Why? Because there might be a better strategy that can help you speed things up. So generally, I prefer to read the last line of the question. So I screen the answers. Then I read the last line of the question, and then I go and read the question. Read the question. I don't read it. Same speed all over the question. Some things I might skip faster, some things I might read in more detail. So my eye is moving. Let's say there are ten words. I don't read the first five words in the CSP, IRB, the next five words. Why? Because there are different importance for these words. That might be the same speed because they're all important. They might be the same scheme because they are not unimportant. But if there is difference importance, I would give more time to the one important things. And again, this comes with time. It's not going to happen right away that you're figuring out what is important, what is not. This is what makes people successful on an exam because they would give different important, different timing to different level of importance for each question. Because you will see now as we read, there are some types of information that are relevant in question a, that might not be relevant in question B, especially after you have an idea of when they asked me about that example that we talked about, the conflict or the main question was about blood giving blood, allowing blood. So in this scenario, I don't care too much about the vital signs and the the clinical portion of the of the scenario. Why? Because here they're not asking me whether I should give blood versus fluids versus antibiotics versus something else. It's not a clinical question. So if I spent so much time on the question trying to figure out the clinical problem and boom, at the end, it's like an ethical problem. Wasted so much time. So let's go ahead and see the same example. How would I approach reading the question? But just before we go, before we go and read that question, there is no one single right answer for this. If you are comfortable reading from beginning to end, That's fine. If you want to try a different strategy, definitely try it before the exam. Don't use strategy for the whole of your preparation. And then on the exam day you want to try something else. Never tried to adventures on the exam. Always try something before you try it on the exam. If it's working. Perfect, You can do it. Try it on assessment tool. Is it working? If it's working, do it. If not, try something else. So now let's go ahead and do that strategy on that question that we will be talking about. So we glanced at the answers as I highlighted, and now I'm going to read the final line of the final sentence of the question here. What is the best next step? Now, very helpful. Sometimes you might find the last line helping you avoid reading the whole question. For example, if they ask you, what is the mechanism of action of heparin? So now you know, specifically it doesn't matter what what has been discussed. The lines before, they ask you a very specific question, they might have presented with a very long scenario, but then they ask you, what is the mechanism of action of heparin? For those who are not familiar with heparin. Heparin is the drug that keeps your blood coagulates so it makes it thinner. So to prevent clots. If they ask you specifically what is the mechanism of action of heparin, you don't need to read the question. It's very obvious that this is simple. Just go and read dancers and find the answer for that. But for this scenario, what is the best next step? It's not obvious. So you might see two types of students here who, after they read the final, final sentence, they might go to the beginning and they start from here for you ate. Or they might go to the sentence before that. So for this type of question, I would go to the sentence before that. As the physician was consenting the patient to receive blood, the patient reports he is Jehovah Witness and he would not like to receive blood. So the patient is 48 now I can ask again at 48. So you see how there is no one single way of the big things. I looked at the last sentence, then I jumped to the symptom. Before that, I wanted to know the age and I'll tell you now I care about the age. Just like a little bit background about this question. Jehovah Witness. Some of them do not accept to take blood for religious reasons. If they're bleeding, they're fine with dying rather than receiving blood. But there is a very important distinction here. If you're a child, your parents or even your beliefs will not stop you from receiving blood. So if this patient was 17 and the patient said, I don't receive blood, the parents say, don't give blood to this patient. As a doctor. You're supposed to give them blood if they were below 18, but above 18, they can decide for themselves. So here I'm faced with a Jehovah Witness whose adult Fourier, who doesn't want to receive blood, the answer would be, respect the patient's wishes and do not administer block. So I avoided reading this whole paragraph and I answered the question based on this. I'm taking too much time now to explain to you the question. But if I was answering this question on the exam, it would literally take me less than 30 seconds. So that's why if you read this excerpt, but I'm going to add 20 to 30 seconds that you can use to solve another question. That's why you might sometimes get away with reading the question. But on the other hand, sometimes you have to read the full question or if you have extra time can read it very quickly just to confirm. So here we're going to read the question very quickly to make sure that we did not miss an important part that might change our answer. 48, history of diabetes, hypertension, coronary, the COPD, these are diseases. If you're not familiar, there are different diseases doesn't change the expression. Present the emergency room after a motor vehicle accidents. So there was an accident. This patient came to the ED afterwards. The patient vital signs blood pressure AD over 40, that's low blood pressure, which means the patients, there is something serious going on. Heart rate is very high, 120, saturation is okay and temperature is okay. Bmi doesn't matter too much. Bmi is. If patient is obese or not. The patient was started on IV fluids. Iv fluids is like fluid to keep your pressure higher. Patient haemoglobin came back at 6.5. That's very low and that reflects that you are losing blood. That's why this is relevant. Wbc is the white count glucose CR K doesn't matter too much in this question here, because I read the answers or ice cream the answers very quickly. I looked at the last line. I'm oriented in my writing. When I'm reading, I focus more on hemoglobin because that matters to me. White cow and glucose are just read it very quickly to make sure it's fine. But I would not spend the same amount of time I'm spending on haemoglobin here, the 6.5 compared to the white count glucose concatenates. The physician suspects intra-abdominal bleeding and wants to order a CT scan. Before sending the patient for a CT scan, the physician wants to stabilize the patient and most Order unit of blood. So you're not supposed to send someone to a CT scan imaging until you make sure that they are stable, they're not going to die in the CT scan. That's why this patient is bleeding. Probably somewhere in his abdomen is pressure is low, heart rate is high, hemoglobin is low, and the physician wants to give the patient blood before you do anything to any patient, you are supposed to ask them if they are okay with that. That's why the physician was consenting the patient. But after the patient after the physician discuss that with the patient, the patient does not want blood. So you see how we read the whole asset and it didn't help us add anything. So that's why you would screen is very quickly or you might even avoid reading it. But as I said in other scenarios, you might have to read it to make sure that there is nothing that would change your diagnosis, you change your answer. Now. You can read the other choices. Give the patient blood despite the patient refusal because this is an emergency and might lead to patient death. No, that's incorrect because even if the mighty to death, the patient has the autonomy to decide what happens with their bodies. So you're not supposed to do something against the patient's wishes. If this is what they wanna do. So they decided no blood, even if that will lead to their death, that's fine. You have to respect their wishes unless they were below 80 in this patient is adult. So they have the right to decide as the white noise. I suppose, as to why this is the patient decision, the decision as the hospital committee to evaluate the situation know you're not supposed to add the hospital is very clear. Patient is understanding the risks. They don't want blood. So that's fine. Respect here, as we said, is probably the correct answer. And do not administer blood. Explain to the patient. So always whenever you see explained to the patient, discussed with the patient, That's a good answer because they might tell you, explain to the patient, try to explain the benefits, the risks. That is definitely a good answer. However, if you continue reading the answer, let's see why it's wrong. Explained to the patient how it's unreasonable to refuse blood in such situation. So if the physician tells the patient it's unreasonable to refuse blood, that's not good. That's not a good way of telling the patient or convincing the patient. If the E was explained to the patient the risks and the benefits of receiving blood and makes sure that they understand that that might be the correct answer. But if you're telling them it's unreasonable to refuse blood, that's not gonna help. And that's probably why this answer is wrong. So in this situation, answer D is the correct answer. So as you saw in this question, we didn't have to read the whole question to be able to answer correctly. 33. Should I read all choices?: Also reading the full answers, this is another debate. Are we supposed to read the full options before we made the final decision? And that depends on your comfort with the answer and the time that you have. So if you have an extra time, I highly recommend you read all the options because sometimes you see that option one is correct, but you read three and might, it might be better. Sometimes they don't tell you choose the correct answer. They tell you choose the best answer. And as you saw, E was the best if they change them in its current format, it's not correct because you're arguing with the patient. You're telling them that the option is not unreasonable. But if it was discussed, risk benefits tried to explain. That might be the best answer. Although you you're supposed to respect the patient's wishes and not give blood. If there is a better answer to discuss and explain and try to understand why they refusing blood, that might be a better answer. If you have time, I highly, highly recommend you read every single option initially thrown before you answer. One, because again, you might choose C, a, G, C is correct, but maybe E is better. Best answer because two of them are correct, but one is better than the other. However, sometimes the answer is not like behavioral questions when you have a builder and best option, sometimes it's very clear what is the color of the sky blue. But the problem is sometimes you think that this is the answer because you still need it in the same page or they look similar. But once you read option D and E Or this is probably the answer that I mix things up. So if you have time, I would recommend reading the only options, making sure that the rest are wrong and that is the one single correct or best answer that you have. However, if you don't have time, you don't have an option. You have to pick an answer quickly. And the best way is to pick whatever you think is the best. 34. Keywords : Finding the keywords in the question could be the key to solving question. That's why they call them keywords. So in this scenario, Jehovah Witness was the key to solving this question. Jehovah Witness and the age, because if we don't have the aid, we won't be able to get the answer. If you don't have Jehovah Witness, that also changes things. So now I know that this patient is infusing blood. So the patient does not want blood is actually more of the patient does not want bladder. Then Jehovah Witness, the key here. The patient does not own blood and his adult. So these are the two words that can make me make the decision. So always search in the question for these keywords that can help you answer the question. However, to identify the keywords, you have to have the knowledge. You can just find keywords on your own whenever you are studying, you have to know what makes things different. That's why I recommended you wrong. You read the explanation of the questions. You read the explanation of the wrong answers whenever you are solving question bank, because that can give you the keywords of differentiating situation, a fun situation. Always pay attention towards such as, never, not always. Because if you're reading the question very quickly and you did not see nuts, for example, the urine, what is recommended in this situation, and it was what is not recommended in this situation. And that will change everything upside down. So be very careful about not never, always, because if you have always and one of the answers was correct, but it's not always the case. That changes the answer. And also to the idea of the best answer. Because as I said, as we saw here, two questions might be correct, but one is better than the other, or if that E was changed as I suggested, that will be the best answer. And although he chose C in scenario a, because B was different, once we fix e, e becomes the answer. Don't be confused if you saw that they answered, respect the patient's wishes and don't give blood in one of the questions. And then after a few questions they said discuss, because discuss might be discussed, understand the risks, understand the benefits, might be a better asset before saying, okay, we're not going to give blood. But if you're confronting the patient and telling the patient know this is our reasonable, that's definitely not the correct answer. So that's why read if they tell you what is the best answer, read all the options, make sure that there is nothing that is throwing the option away to make another option to correctly. 35. Option elimination strategy: Let's go over other question quickly. If you look at the answers, you see dementia, dementia, vascular Alzheimer. I have an idea. Now. I don't need to read the rest of the questions. I see dimension all of them and different types of dementia. So I know that the IRS asking me about what is the type of dementia, I read the final line. The most likely diagnosis in this case is they're asking about what is this scenario representing? Which type of dimension? I go and start reading the question. A 60-year-old patient with a history of heart attacks, diabetes, smoking, hypercholesterolemia, presenting with one year history of confusion, trouble paying attention, concentration, reduced ability to organize, slowed thinking and personality change. Patient was found last four times over the last few months because he was not able to find his way back home. So the patient is having problem with concentration, finding his way home, organization personality change, and it's been happening over the last year. The family reports that his memory problems preceded his personality changed and cognitive decline has been gradual. Without sudden changes, the patient vital signs are stable, so I need to quickly these vital signs and they're stable. The family is concerned about the patient. What is the most likely diagnosis? For this question, I'm going to follow the option eliminating strategy in which we don't know what the answer is, but we're going to eliminate the option that is owned and we will be left with the correct one. So let's start with vascular dementia. Vascular dementia, what makes it different? Or the keyword vascular dementia is stepwise decline. Your functional decline in a stepwise manner. And here we have gradual. So that's why vascular dementia is not correct in this case. Alzheimer dementia will leave this to the n, frontotemporal dementia. What makes this one different is that personality change happens early, early on in the disease. Here you can see that the memory problems preceded the personality change. That's why frontotemporal dementia is not the answer here. Lewy body dementia. Lewy body dementia. It makes it unique, or the keyword for that is visual hallucinations and Parkinson disease. In addition to the dementia, there is no mention of that year. So that's also not correct. Kuwait's felt Jacob disease. That's one of the types of dementia. But dementia happens over a very rapid course. This patient has been having dementia for one year. That's why Jacob is not the correct answer. And we are left with the Alzheimer dementia. If I go now and explain to you Alzheimer dementia, it fits with the description of the case here. It happens gradually over one year. That is personality change, the concentration changes. There is memory, but these happen early on before the personality changes. So here we followed the option eliminating strategy in which we removed the options that are or seem to be incorrect and we are left with the correct one and we confirm that this is the correct one with our knowledge about the correct option, the optionally mating strategy is very helpful whenever you're not sure about the answer. So you go and exclude the ones you are sure are wrong. So if you know that this is wrong, you are left with the possible correct ones. Sometimes you are left with two or three and you give your best guess. Sometimes if you know that this is the answer, perfect, you can go ahead and pick it. But if you are left with two or three, or five or six, you can take a guess and hope that this is the correct answer. The thing is, most exams, they don't take out points from you if you answered wrong, some do. But if this is the case, if they don't, take out points, if you answer a question wrong, go and give your best guess. Because if you left it empty, you're not gonna get the score anyway. But if you throw a dice and you have one or two options that are left with, is like a 50% chance of getting the question correct. If you have one of three left, you have a thirty-three percent chance of getting it correct. So don't leave empty questions on the exam. If you are not sure, eliminate the ones that are definitely wrong, and give a guess, give your best guess and go for the next question. 36. Don't get stuck!: One mistake I see students make whenever they solving questions on the exam is that they get stuck on certain questions. They have so many questions left behind, and that one question sucks all the time and you don't have enough time for the rest of the questions. And the bad news is sometimes after we spent five minutes where you only have one minute for each question, you might ask them the question wrong. In my opinion. If there is a question that you are not sure about or you don't know the answer is, or you think it requires way more time than the one-minute, leave it until the end so you can flag it or write a piece of paper, for example, Question Twelve, I need to come back to it to answer it, or I need to come back to it to make sure that the answer is correct. Go over all the questions and then come back to it because you don't want to lose the chance to solve five easy questions. Because you spent all the time on this one. Sometimes you might get it right, but sometimes you might get wrong. So you wasted the time on these five questions for nothing. So that's why if you don't know the answer or you're not sure, give it your best guess, market, flag it, write it down somewhere. So all the questions and then come back to it. Some people recommend not leaving any questions blood. So even if you don't know or you're not sure, answered anything, and then come back to it later because you might not have the chance to come back and throw random guess. Just answer it and then come back and make sure that it's correct. If you think that you will have time, you can keep it empty. Once you finish, you can come back to it and answer the question. 37. Should I change my answer?: Reviewing questions, are you supposed to review questions after you finish the first round of operations? So let's say you had 60 minutes or 60 questions. In 40 minutes, you finished all the questions. You have 20 minutes that you're supposed to go and review the questions. In my opinion, if you have time, use it. If you have any questions, I would go first with the questions you flag questions you marked question that you are not sure about. And then read it more in detail. Give it more time to make sure that you chose the correct answer. Lead all the options, make sure that the rest are wrong and this is the correct one. And in that case, you confirming that this is the correct answer. So yes, in my opinion, if you have time, go ahead and review first the questions you are not sure about. And then if you have time left, you can review the rest of the question. But the $1 million question is, are you supposed to change your answers after you answer them on the first round? Because some students, whenever they go and start thinking about the question, more, they change the answer and now it's wrong. So they have a tendency to change the words, the wrong asset, they always, their best guess is the first one. And whenever this overthink something, they change it to the wrong answer, I have a solution for you for that, never change an asset unless you're a 100% sure that the option you're changing two is the correct one. So if I'm not sure, I mark a or B and then I came back now on tending more towards VM, tending more towards a I don't usually choose the answer. If I'm not sure, I go with my best guess, my with my first guess. So I answered the question of my own. My first guest was untrue between a and b. I answered a, for example, when I come back, if I don't have evidence for B, I stay with a. But if I come back and I see, oh my gosh, there is a PCL and I didn't pay attention to this keyword, I didn't include it in my analysis of the question. And now because of this, I think B is correct. I'll change it on definitely change it because now I have evidence that B is correct. If you're unsure and you don't have extra evidence to support the other answer, in my opinion, don't change it. But one way I always recommend for my students is you try it. So golden exam, this exam of course, and see if you change your answers. Are you usually someone who changed their answers from correct, wrong, or wrong? Correct. So you can get the percentage you might change, for example, 20 from Rome to correct a due from correct, wrong. In this case, you're changing more towards be correct to stay with that. So try it and see what type of person are you For me personally, the strategy I use. If I don't have evidence of just like thinking and unsure, I keep my first guess. If I'm sure or I had extra evidence that it didn't pay attention to. I would go with the one I have evidence for that. That brings us to the end of this lesson about questions solving strategies. 38. Writing notes: Should you take notes when you're preparing for an exam? In my opinion, notes serve a very important role, which is decreasing the amount of information you have to review in the final stages of your preparation. So imagine you have to study a thousand or 2 thousand pages from a book for your exam, instead of having to review the whole one or 2 thousand pages before your exam in the last week or two weeks, you will be only focusing on the high-yield concepts, concept that you need help with. You need to review multiple times or things that are more likely to show him the exam. So that's why I personally recommend taking notes when you're, when you're preparing for your exam. But nodes are not necessarily written. Through an example. I'll show you now different ways on how to take notes to serve the purpose of decreasing the amount of information you have to review in the second or third stage of your preparation. Now let's go back to our example, the heart attack one, in which we will be taking example from this paragraph. So we said the heart attack occurs when the flow of blood to the heart is blocked. The blockage is most often to build up of these three items they mentioned here, fat, cholesterol and substances which form a plague in the arteries that feed the heart. So one way of taking notes is actually to write down notes. So you have a piece of paper and you write everything down. Definitely writing everything down is not going to help. If you rewrite that paragraph on paper, it's not going to be helpful. Why are you doing that? You can just read it from the textbook or from the video or from the picture that you are doing. You don't have to replicate the whole thing on papers. That is just a waste of time in my opinion. However, if you write a small portion of that, that might be helpful me personally, I'm not a fan of handwriting because I see that that takes more time than the other forms of note that I'll talk about. But if you are someone who likes to handwrite, because some people believed that when they write things by their hand, that increase the retention of this information. So if you are someone who likes to do that, do it in the way that you are an active learner. Remember when we talked about, when we talked about active learning and how you can summarize the information, organize it in a different way, teach it to yourself. Handwriting of nodes in this way could be helpful. But remember, don't overdo it because writing too many nodes might take more time than that can help you. So if you write too many nodes and you end up reviewing the whole nodes, it's much easier to just review the material from in the first place instead of having to write notes which will take lot of time and then having to review the node. So if you want to make notes, make sure that they are organized in a concise way that makes you able to review it in a shorter time period. Remember, in my opinion, the node's value is to review the same material in a shorter time period. If you recreate the materials that can be helpful. Now I'm going to show you an example of how you can summarize that piece of information, that paragraph into a note if you want to write that down. So one way of doing this is you can type coronary artery and you can put an arrow, can type blockage and arrow heart attack. So you can see how this way is summarizing the information. Now I make sure that you know this information. If you summarize it in this way, that means that you got the idea behind the heart attack. That there is coronary artery that feeds the heart, that is blocked, that leads to heart attack. And other information you might get from this paragraph is the plague composition. You can type plague, and here you can type fat cholesterol. Let's represent the receipt and others. So now we know the composition of a plague is fat cholesterol and other. So in this way, although you're writing down the information which as you saw, it takes time, you are summarizing it. You are involved in the active learning, which is still helpful. But make sure you don't overdo it. Don't try it down so many nodes because that will take time and that is against the idea of efficiency. I've seen some students who summarize a thousand page book into 300 page notebook, which is in my opinion is not very harmful because the time it took you to write 300 pages, insignificant. So it's fine if you do it for certain things, but not everything because that will take time. Another form of taking notes, which in my opinion is more efficient, is to copy, paste certain pieces of information, and then highlight underline, bold certain pieces of that information. So if you wanted to summarize the information about the play composition, you can go here and tap on fat, cholesterol, other substances, copy it and go to the document and paste it. And you can type lake here. As most of us are faster with typing compared to writing, it would make more sense for us to type that information because you're faster with typing. Now we summarize the same info play fasciculus or other substances by taking that from the document, by copy-pasting. You can also color definitely make when you're making notes, when you're taking notes, copy paste from the document to another notebook, you can color them. That makes it nicer to read. And also it gives different levels of information. So for example, if the idea of blockage, heart attack is easy to you, you can keep it in black, but the play composition is important. You can go and highlight this area and maybe change the color of that. So you can underline it or you can highlight it like that. You can change the color. So now you know, for example, if it's highlighted in yellow, that means it's important. If it's highlighted in red, that means it's very important. So even if I had one day to review, I have to review the red nodes. If I have more days, I would review the green ones and red ones. If I have plenty of times, I would review the yellow, red, and green. If I have so much time, I would review everything. Now you create the system of the level of importance of the likelihood of you forgetting things are relating to the color, maybe combination of copy-pasting and writing on an electric electronic version as we have here. I think that would be the most ideal because some things are easier for you to write down. It could be like a diagram or a flow sheet of something. And sometimes it's easier to just copy paste because you don't want to repeat the whole table and repeat the whole figure. So a combination of both handwritten and copy pasting would be ideal, especially if you do that on an electronic version like here on an iPad with the pen, you can write some things in the Word document and you can copy some things. And you can also paste pictures. For example, if you wanted to copy this picture, can go copy it and go and paste it in the Word document. So if we go here, click Paste. Now we have this image that you can also do things on. So if we go here to draw and you can name some things, you can highlight some things. So you would have everything in the same place and you created a combination of the handwriting, which is which is something you did by your hand with a pen on the document itself in addition to the copy paste. The reason why I like copy paste is because it saves you time. I know that some people like to write everything with hand, but this saves you much time. And I would rather review the information two or three times rather than spending so much time on writing. But again, in my opinion, a combination of these would be ideal because you'd have the chance to write some things with your hand, create some diagrams, and also copy, paste tables, pictures and comment over them, and change the different colors based on the level of importance. 39. Notes through questions : Another extremely important way of taking notes is creating questions. So some people do not live to create nodes because it goes against the idea of active learning. So if you want, if you're just reading this, these nodes after you first round, it's not going to be helpful because it's passive learning, you're just reading. But if you involve yourself in the act of retrieval, you cover these pieces, you cover like for example, coronary artery blockage. What leads to that? Or, you know that here you're talking about heart attack you, so you start remembering things. Here is active learning. But if you just gonna read these notes, it's not going to be helpful. That's why some people prefer the other way, which is creating questions about these concepts. So here instead of typing plague, fat, cholesterol, and other substances, you can type what is the column position of a plague? And you will have a question mark. And to answer that, you go here and highlight this area, fat, cholesterol and other substances. You copy it and paste it here. So now you had a question and answer style that is active learning, that is act of retrieval. And it's going to stick once you read the question. So you read the question and you try to answer it when you're reviewing your notes. So instead of reading play cholesterol, fat, and other substances, you're asking yourself, what is the composition of the plague? And you let your brains search for the, for that information. You struggle until you find it. If you don't find it, it's fine. You go ahead and read the answer, and that can help solidify the information in long-term memory. So another way of taking forms is transforming that information into a question and answer style. That is another very helpful way of taking notes. The same way I showed you how you can create nodes through questions. You can use that in the Anki decks or any of these apps that show you these questions at different intervals. So you can type the question and copy paste the answer. And now you have nodes so that you see, in my opinion, nodes are not necessarily written words about something. It's a way of reviewing inflammation. So you denote could be taken through a question. They're not going to be taken through copy-paste, through a diagram to a table, throw a picture. All of these are ways for you to review the information when you go to the second stage of your studying. So the same way you can type a question, write the answer either in this Word document or in Anki deck or any of the apps that can help you with that. Another way you can transform the idea of coronary artery blockage, heart attack. You can type what is the cause of a heart attack and you can some spacing here. The answer would be coronary artery blockage. And you can, as I said, you can color things in different colors. You can change the Bolding. All these ways help you to remember this information in a more efficient manner or to create a system of reviewing. And as you're studying, you will see there are different topics, there are different subtopics. So if you're studying internal medicine or medicine in general, there are systems within medicine. So you can create a file for cardiology, a file for pulmonology, a file for endocrinology. Whenever you're searching for endocrinology related questions, you go to that specific file. So these also you can do the same with the decks. If you have an Anki deck for cardio, if you have an Anki deck for Endo, you'd have the questions related to that there. So you can either write notes, but remember my advice, keep them concise, very short and things that you cannot copy. You can also copy paste to an electronic version such as notebook, electronic notebook, or there are multiple apps these days or just a word document. You can combine that with you writing things in the notebook. You would have copy pasting, you would have things you wrote yourself. Or you can create these nodes through questions and answers like we did here. And you can put them in the same notebook that you have in a Word document or notebook, or in one of the apps that create flashcards for you, such as Anki. Always remember taking notes is art. It's not that simple. If you are taking so much, so many nodes, that's not gonna be helpful to you if you take so little nodes, that's also not going to be helpful. You have to know what is important, what is not. That's why you see some students actually, they don't take note in the first round of studying because they're scooping the inflammation, they scoping the subject. They want to know what is important, what is not. And in the second round they start taking notes. That's also an effective strategy. That's why you need to figure out what works for you. And it also depends on your school, how fast you learn the type of subject. But as I said, some students like to take notes after the first time. They don't take any notes from the first time. Some people like to do it from the beginning. But what if you are studying from a book, it won't be possible to copy, paste, or create a question decks by copy-pasting from an actual book because you can't copy paste. So one way of making notes or decreasing the amount of information you have to review is true, underlining and highlighting. So you can choose different colors. Pencil to underlie different things. You can highlight them that can help you decrease the amount of information you have to review. Be careful because if you're not familiar with the topic or the subject, you might be putting a lot of highlighting underlining because everything is new to you. But once you go to your second round, you might say to yourself, Oh, this, I don't need this highlighting anymore and you can take it out. So some students do not like to put any underlining and highlighting on their first round of studying. They only do it on the second round. So that's another way of decreasing the amount of information you have to review if you're studying from an actual book by underlining and highlighting, and you can definitely type questions, type notes on an electronic version of a notebook. Prefer that over writing down notes because it's faster to type rather than right? So you can create definitely Anki flashcards. You can create flashcards to any of the apps. You can create a Word document in which you put all your notes in there that you took from the book. So these are few ideas on how to take notes and how to create a material that is easier or shorter to review than reviewing the whole material that you started with. 40. Notes | Summary: So in summary, there are different ways to create nodes or decrease the amount of information you have to review. You can write concise notes. You can create electronic version of a notebook in which you copy paste information from the resource you are studying from to that electronic version of a notebook. You can copy pictures, you can copy tables, flow diagrams. You can combine your copy pasting with writing down some concise electronic nodes. You can transform the material into Q&A question and answer, which can help you in the act of retrieval active learning, you can create flashcards through Anki or any of the other flashcard apps. You can use different colors to highlight underline on the book itself that you are studying from. Finally, don't overdo it. Don't throw the whole material in the notebook. Don't highlight everything on your book. Tried to familiarize yourself with the subject. Try to know what is important, what is not. So when you create your notes, you focus more on the high-yield concepts, the concepts that are likely to be tested on the exam, and the concept that you think will be forgotten and needs to be reviewed. There are definitely more ways to take notes when studying if you have any interesting and unique way other than what we discussed, make sure to leave it in the discussion so we can learn from it. And that brings us to the end of this lesson about how to take notes when studying for exams. 41. Sleep : Today we'll be talking about the day before your exam, day, after all the studying that you put in, the strategies that you implement on the day before your exam day can make a difference between you getting the score that you are looking for versus not. So let's go over some of the commonly asked questions that I get from students I tutor regarding the day before you're examining. The first one is sleeping. How many hours of sleep should I get on the exam on the day before the exam day, especially that some students study a lot. So the more hours and decrease the number of hours they sleep on the day before the exam day. In my opinion, you should sleep the normal regular hours that you sleep every day. So if you are someone who sleep seven hours a day, sleep seven hours on the day before the exam. They don't try to sleep more than try to sleep less, or take from the sleeping hours towards studying hours. Because if you're not a refresh on the exam day, you might not be focused and you might miss questions that you know easily if you're getting enough hours of sleep. So again, just leave the regular hours of sleep. You sleep every day. If you're someone who sleeps eight, sleep aid. If you're someone who's lived seven. Seven, don't change anything on the day before the exam day. What time should I sleep on the day before the exam day? You have to sleep at the time that allows you enough hours of sleep. So if you're someone who sleeps for eight hours a day, you have to sleep eight hours before the exam. You'll also have to allow some time in the morning for you to wake up and go to the exam, please. But you have to sleep at the time that allows you to get enough hours of sleep. So if you are someone who's been sleeping regular hours, for example, at night, you sleep, you study in the morning. In this case, you don't have to change your sleeping schedule. So keep the same hours that you usually sleep back. So if you're slipping at 11:00 PM, waking up at seven AM and your exam is at eight. That's fine. Keep the same sleeping schedule. Don't try to sleep earlier because that might cause you stress if you're just lying in bed, not falling asleep because you're going to bid two hours earlier than your regular sleeping schedule and don't go later and take from your hours of sleep to study. You'll see some students prefer to study at night because it's more quiet, less distractions. So they would be studying at night and sleeping in the morning. And as we said, most exams are done in the morning and that would cause a problem in your sleep cycle because now you're used to sleep in the morning and steady at night. And now you have to suddenly sleep at 11 PM pm, so you can sleep seven to eight hours and go to the exam on time. So in this case, I recommend that you change your sleeping schedule ahead of time at least two weeks before the exam day because it's very hard for our bodies to suddenly sleep seven to eight hours earlier than our regular sleeping schedule in one day. That's why I tried to change that way earlier, two weeks and then follow the same sleeping schedule, the time you sleep, the time you wake up. That allows me enough hours of sleep and you can go to the exam and type. Another question I get asked about a lot is sleeping aid. Should I use sleeping aid before the exam sometimes or most of us are stressed before the exam and we need something to help us sleep. In my opinion, don't take the heavy sleeping aids because that might make you sleep in the next day. And I had a friend who actually took a very heavy sleeping aid on the day before the exam and the next day who is very sleepy and the examiner was not able to focus throughout the exam. So if you want to try something, definitely try it before the exam to even three weeks before, take that pill and see how are you feeling the next day, maybe do a mock exam on the next day and see how your performance is being affected by that pill. Because sometimes you might not feel sleepy when you're studying. But because solving questions is more intense on our brains, you might feel sleepy with that. So that's why I recommend trying everything before. Imagine that you have an exam the next day. Solve the same number of questions in number of hours after you take that bill and see how it's affecting you. Generally, melatonin is not hard and our concentration, so if you take a three or five or even ten for some people, it doesn't affect your concentration the next day. Definitely try everything before you experiment on yourself. The first time on the day before the exam day, somebody for sleeping, get enough hours of sleep on the day before your exam day. Don't take from the hours of sleep towards studying. Avoid sudden changes in your sleeping schedule. Try to have consistent hours of going to bed, waking up, especially the week before the exam and avoid heavy sleeping aids and definitely try any pill that you want to take weeks ahead of the exam. 42. Study hours : How many hours should you study on the day before the exam day? And the answer to this question will depend on the type of Examiner. Because you'll see as you go through your schooling through university, through college, you'll see some exams that require short-term knowledge. If you study a lot that book or that specific material or this specific slides on the day before the exam day, it can boost your score significantly. And some exams require long-term knowledge. So there will be thousands and thousands of pages that are tested on this exam. So you won't have the ability to review everything on the day before the exam date. So if you're from the first scenario where your exam requires short-term knowledge, you might be dedicating the day before the exam to studying fully because each hour can answer a question on your exam. But again, don't compromise on sleep. So use the day hours due to study and don't compromise when you're asleep. But if your exam is from the second type, the one that requires long-term knowledge, it's unlikely that studying on the day before the exam they will significantly change your score. It might change your score a little bit, but it's unlikely that it's going to, it's going to change it significantly. Why? Because usually these exams tests long-term knowledge. So something you studied the day before the exam is unlikely to change your score significantly. Again, because of the massive number of materials included in that exact, generally requires knowledge that has been built over years, months, or at least weeks because that's how the exam is built in this scenario, I recommend that you dedicate more time for you to relax. Because generally for these exams, you've been studying for months, sometimes a year or two. So studying the day before the exam day is unlikely to change the score significantly. So if you study a lot on the day before the exam day and you won't have a significant change in your score, but maybe increasing your stress. I would take a few hours from your studying time and dedicated towards something that would make you less stressed, such as going out with friends or going out with family or just sitting out, sitting with family or friends, chatting, maybe exercising a little bit. Don't do something extensive or intense that would change your concentration or don't go to a club, drink loud because that also can affect your concentration the next day, do something simple, something chill that you'd like to do that will help decrease your stress without increasing your anxiety. How to decrease stress on the day before your exam day. One strategy is to have small tasks on the final day of your preparation. Don't put so many things like 1000 pages to review on the final day of your preparation. Because if you didn't have enough time to do that, you will feel stressed because you didn't achieve your goals or tasks for that specific day. So only have few things that you can finish. And if you had extra time, you can do whatever you like. But don't put so many tasks on the final day of your preparation. So in summary, on the day before your exam day, get enough sleep. Don't put so many things to study, especially if your exam requires long-term memory, because it's not going to make a huge difference if you study for an extra hour or two on the day before your exam. Relaxing activities that you'd like to enjoy, such as exercise, going out, sitting with family or friends, but don't overdo things. Don't try a new adventure. It's definitely do not try to adventure or new experiences on the day before your exam day. Always try these things before because you don't want to experience something unexpected on your exam day, especially if you've been preparing for this example a month. If you have any questions about the final day of your preparation, make sure to put them in the discussion and good luck everyone on your exam. 43. The End: That brings us to the end of this course. I hope this course has been an enjoyable and useful experience to help you ace your examination. If you have any questions, you can leave them in discussion and we will be answering them as soon as possible. Good luck everyone on your exam, now you have all the tools that you need to always remember we are here for you.