Boost Your Grades By Semester’s End With These 3 Study Hacks

You’re almost at the semester finish line, and can’t wait for a break! With social events looming on the calendar to kick off vacation, it can be extremely difficult to buckle down and complete those last minute projects or study for those last few exams. Finals mark the end of school, but they are, indeed, final‚ you have no more chances to raise your grades before they affect your permanent transcript! Sometimes, you signed up for an unexpectedly super challenging class, or luck was against you and you landed a teacher that likes to shake up the curriculum by throwing continuous curveballs at students; there’s nothing you can do about that, but as a result, your grades are suffering. Don’t worry, there are things that you can do! Any last minute ditch effort to get your grades up will at least show your teacher that you’re trying. But, before you start chugging Red Bulls or turning to other harmful means of memory enhancement, try these three study aides before your next big test to avoid cramming and crashing. 1. Start a solid sleep routine. Getting a good night’s sleep before a final or a group presentation is always the best idea, but one night won’t do much if you spend the rest of them staying up late. If you start getting in the habit of going to bed early two or more weeks ahead of time, your body and mind has a stock pile of rehabilitation hours to fall back on when the stress of a test enters the picture. While you sleep, your brain repairs itself and your body decompresses from daily activities, meaning that you awaken carte blanche‚ almost as if you’ve been rewired overnight. Do this enough times before a stressful day, and your body will react less adversely than it would sleep-deprived. Plus, who can focus when they’re overtired? 2. Play word association games. Got a test around the corner with a lot of vocabulary words involved? If you’ve tried the normal memorization methods of flash cards and study sheets, try relating your vocab words to other words that might trigger memory recall. For instance, you could do pneumonic association for a series, like “never eat soggy waffles’ to remember “north, east, south, and west’. For single words, try to using something in its definition as a signifier. An example of this is if you had a psychology test and you associate “operant conditioning’ with “operating’ with “it’s rewarding when things operate correctly’ with the actual definition of “a method of learning occurring through rewards or punishments of behavior’. There’s always a way to connect the dots, so do what makes the most sense to you and watch your grades improve. 3. Break it down. Instead of trying to tackle the whole semester overview the night before a final or midterm, try breaking it down into sections that you study over many nights. Your textbook conveniently comes in chapters, so tackle the subject a couple chapters at a time. Put the book down, get a full night’s sleep, engage in other mental activity, and come back to do the next few chapters the following night. Watch how you retain the material better, just by taking a step back! Do you know of other effective study aides that have worked for you? Let us know your story in the comments!