Study hacks for exam success

WITH the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination almost knocking on your doors, it is time to get down to some serious studying.

This does not mean locking yourself in your room and spending sleepless nights poring over your textbooks and notes, because when it comes to working hard versus working smart, the latter will take you further.

By working smart, you can get better results without wearing yourself out in the process. Here are some smart study hacks to help you surge ahead in the final leg of your SPM preparation.

Chew your way to glory

Who could have guessed that the simple act of chewing a gum while studying can help you concentrate better?

More than one study have proven the effectiveness of chewing a gum while studying, with the latest one being done by a group of psychologists from St Lawrence University, the United States.

The experiment involved 159 students who were asked to perform some demanding perceptive tasks. The ones who were given chewing gums (sugar-free as well as with sugar) when performing the tasks outperformed those who were not given any gums.

As sugar had no effect on their performance, the increased concentration is linked to the act of chewing. Scientists suggest that the enhanced performance is due to “mastication-induced arousal”.

Therefore, make gums part of your study essentials and chew all you want while doing your revision.

Teach to reach your goal

Teaching is one of the best ways to get a good grasp of any topic. If you are wondering why, try teaching a topic to someone who knows nothing about it and realise how much more attention you have to give to the topic.

Teaching is one of the best ways to get a good grasp of any topic. If you are wondering why, try teaching a topic to someone who knows nothing about it and realise how much more attention you have to give to the topic.

Oftentimes, we tend to overlook minute details within a topic because when studying, we comprehend just enough to help us get by in a test.

On the other hand, teaching calls for getting to the root of the topic. You cannot effectively explain a topic to someone for as long as you do not thoroughly understand it yourself.

That is exactly what examiners look for in your answer sheets – how well you can explain what you know.

A system for long-term memory

One of the best techniques for memorising is to create mnemonics. For example, to remember the names of the nine planets, a commonly used mnemonic is My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets, which stands for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Mnemonics can be applied to any set of words, phrases or ideas that requires assistance to remember. You can find examples on the Internet or get creative and form your own. Having a mnemonic for a list or sequence of things you need to memorise would help you better recall them in the examination hall.

The more you repeat doing something, the better you will get at it. Besides revising your notes, it is important to practise answering examination questions. Find past-year examination papers to answer, treat them like a real test and give yourself a time limit to answer each paper.

By practising this way, you would not only be able to keep tabs on the amount of time you are taking to complete a paper, but also identify which section you need to work on.

You would also be less stressed when you sit for the real examination, because you would already be a pro in allocating time to optimally answer every section of a paper.

Train your mind to keep calm

Examinations are stressful, especially major ones such as SPM. However, stressing up or panicking in the examination hall would only work against you, making you lose precious time that you could have used to write down your answers.

So why not train your mind to stay calm? One of the ways to achieve this is by meditating. Apart from relaxing your mind, meditation also helps increase your concentration.

According to a study titled The effect of meditation on brain structure: cortical thickness mapping and diffusion tensor imaging published in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience journal, meditation can improve various cognitive processes, particularly sustained attention.

The trick is to train your mind to focus. Start by meditating for a few minutes and increase it to about a half hour every day. If you keep at it, you will see the positive effect it has on your memory and concentration.

Give your brain a break

Studying smart means understanding that your brain is not a machine that can operate

According to a study titled The effect of meditation on brain structure: cortical thickness mapping and diffusion tensor imaging published in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience journal, meditation can improve various cognitive processes, particularly sustained attention.

without breaks. Your mind needs sleep to allow it to assimilate all the information you have crammed into it.

Without sufficient rest, you would find yourself tired and forgetting even the simplest things when studying. Hence, instead of staying up late every night to study, optimise your daytime for studying so you can reward yourself with a good night’s rest.

Keep your mind from wandering

If you cannot seem to control yourself from reaching out for your phone every now and then when you are supposed to be studying, take the help of the many selfcontrol apps available online.

These apps can block or limit time spent on websites or apps that are most distracting to you, essentially ridding you of the temptation to check on your friends’ social media activity every five minutes.

By studying smart in the last few days leading up to your examination, you would be gifting yourself a bright future full of possibilities.