Want to make a concept stick? Learn how to space out your studying.
There are very simple but effective tricks you can implement when studying for any exam that will help embed concepts into your long term memory.
Let’s look at a couple ways.
Cramming a Different Way
The young professionals that we teach at Professional Exam Tutoring are old enough to know that cramming doesn’t always work. This is especially true for exams with a lot of content like the CFA Exam or the Series 7 Top-Off Exam. In simpler times, like during high school or freshmen year in college, maybe you could get away with it. But, it’s not worth the risk when your job is on the line.
If you were a serial crammer in those years you may have never learned effective study techniques for a large amount of information.
Well you’re in luck. There is one type of cramming that is effective.
Specifically, when you study a difficult concept, you want to cram as many practice questions as you can into your study process to exhaust all possible ways that concept can be tested. Think of it like practicing your golf swing, or a few bars from a song on the piano, over, and over, and over, and….you get it.
This type of practice works. Think back to high school math when you learned a new concept. Your teacher might give you 10-15 different practice questions on a single concept. If you did your homework, and got through the practice questions, chances are that these drills helped.
Studies (by Ericsson and others) show that it is often “working on the hard parts” that drives performance. If you get stuck on the Options section for the SIE Exam for instance, consider doing 15-20 practice questions at a time. This can really “hammer home” a concept, and will solidify understanding. It helps you see a concept from a bunch of different angles. Importantly though, you need to pair this with one more study trick to ensure it sticks…
Space Out Your Studying (Don’t Cram It)
Even though you should cram in 15-20 practice questions on difficult subjects all at once, don’t just leave it at that.
You should revisit those same questions (or preferably new ones on the same topic) again within 72 hours at most. While many of us like to think that we have great memories, the average person won’t retain a new concept – especially a difficult one – if they don’t review it within a few days.
Many of our students may empathize with this when it comes to Options for the SIE Exam, or Series 7. The Options section is one of the most confusing topics on these exams. In our experience, if our students don’t review it at least 2-3 times per week with around 20-30 practice questions per sitting, proficiency is highly unlikely.
Space out your studying in such a way that you continuously rotate through difficult concepts. This helps keep them fresh.
For instance, if you did Options on Monday, don’t touch it again until Thursday. If you did the Margin section on Tuesday, don’t touch it again until Friday. You may have to study multiple topics per day, but spacing them out is key to solidifying the concepts into your long term memory.
Plenty of academic research backs up this method (check out studies by Dr. Kornell from Williams College). But we can tell you that we see it first-hand as tutors too!
The bottom line is that you should work on the hard stuff in spurts, then space out that work to make it more concrete. Good luck!