Being a student in college is a hard task, especially when it comes to tests and exams. Every few weeks there is usually a new cycle of exams or if you’re like me, you have at least one or two exams a week, which can get be difficult to keep up with. Learning a large abundance of new information in five maybe six different classes at once makes it very hard to store this information into your memory. This is where knowing proper ways to study really pays off. As stated in lecture, students who are looking to improve their grades and decrease their stress levels should understand distributed practice and maintenance rehearsal; that is “Studying 1 hour each night for 5 nights is better than studying 5 hours in 1 night” (Wede). Maintenance rehearsal can be defined as the practice of saying some information to be remembered over and over in one’s head in order to maintain it in short-term memory. With new exams coming week after week, being able to recall this information from your short-term memory due to maintenance rehearsal is much easier than trying to memorize all the test information in one sitting. Also, if this information is rehearsed long enough it can in fact end up being stored in your long-term memory, which really pays off on those comprehensive exams at the end of the semester.

When learning about these studying methods and how it affects your grades I immediately thought of my roommate. My roommate likes to do a million things at once, so when it comes to exams she usually loses focus on preparing ahead and tends to work on other class material until the night before her exam and then realizes she has to get all her studying done in one night. Not only does this push her stress level through the roof but she ends up being more focused on the time constraint than her test material. This lack of focus and time affects how the information is being processed in her memory and also doesn’t allow much rehearsal like the distributed practice method of studying does. Without rehearsal the information doesn’t stay in the memory as long and therefore is harder to recall on the test. Her most recent exam ended up being on a week where she didn’t have that much other class work and she was able to start studying earlier in the week for her exam. She found that when she started studying earlier and got to review the material a little bit each day before the exam, her grade improved dramatically. Personally I think every student will see just how much knowing these proper study methods would help.