Five things the best students do differently

I was not academic to begin with, and school was hard for me. I failed classes early on, my Danish grade in the first year of gymnasium for one, and nobody could tell me how to study. Everyone told me to spend more time with my books, basically to work harder. So I tried many things, and a lot of it was a waste of time. I ultimately found what worked for me, well enough to finish two master’s degrees with top results. Later, teaching university students, I noticed that many of the top students used the same techniques.

You do not need to be a genius to be a top student. Doing well at exams is a skill, and like any skill it can be taught. The most important thing to learn in school is how to learn. That is what you take with you forever. Most of the syllabus you forget.

In more than ten years of teaching I saw the same pattern nearly every semester. The students who did best did five things differently, and none of them were taught in any course.

1. They start with the question the course is trying to answer

Most students start on page one and read forward. The problem is not the reading, it is that you do not know what you are looking for. You are swimming without a direction, and everything on the page looks equally important.

The best students start somewhere else. Before the reading begins they work out what question the course is trying to answer, or in plain terms: what is this course about? From then on every lecture and every chapter has a job, which is to help them answer it. They still read with curiosity, they just know what they are looking for.

It takes ten minutes, and it looks different in every subject. Here are some examples:

• Finance: how are assets priced, including what a future payment is worth today, and how do you use that to decide what to invest in?
• Anatomy: how is the body structured, and how does that structure make each part able to do its job?
• History: what happened before us, and how does it help us reason about the present and the future? Many students think history is about memorizing dates and events. It is really about drawing the parallels.

Write your version down in one sentence. If you cannot, ask your lecturer in the first week. It is the best question you will ask all semester.

2. They get the structure before the details

The second thing they do, usually in the first week, is build a frame to hang everything on. It is two steps.

A) They get the overview of the course topics. The syllabus, the learning goals, the chapters in the book, and out of that the overall topics the course is really made of. In most courses there are only five to ten. They write them down, or build the mental model, at the start rather than at the end. That way every note, every lecture and every exercise has a bucket to go into, instead of piling up as one long document with no structure.

B) They look at old exam papers. Not to predict the questions, but to see what is actually tested, how it is tested, and at what level of detail. The syllabus does not show you how deep you need to go. Previous exams give you a much better grasp of that.

Both of these happen in week one, not right before the exam.

3. They practice more than they read

Practice makes perfect. That is true of most things, and it is just as true when you prepare for an exam, but almost nobody studies that way.

Nobody expects to get good at basketball by reading about basketball. You would train, and you would play games. Yet most students prepare for an exam by reading and taking notes, and call it studying.

The best students focus on application. They do the exercises early in the course rather than at the end, they work with material as close to the real thing as they can get, and above all they simulate the exam itself. If your exam is four hours, closed book, then at some point before the real one you sit down and do four hours, closed book. It is hard training, but it works, and most students never do it once.

Between the simulations, the ordinary exercises do the rest of the job. Applying what you think you understand is how you find out whether it actually stuck.

4. They work steadily, not in sprints

Learning needs repetition and time to settle, and an exam sprint gives it neither. I know how hard that is to avoid. I was a student too, and I have sat in the same panic in the last three weeks before an exam.

Two things get you most of the way. The first is to go to class and actually be there mentally. Most students turn up. Far fewer are paying attention, and an hour of real attention in a lecture is worth more than ten hours of sitting there distracted.

The second is one hour a day of deep focus, on your own. Not four, not “read everything”, one hour where nothing else is open. I did mine in the morning as a student. Up at 5am, coffee, one hour on the course before the day started. What goes in that hour changes. Some days it is exercises, some days it is skimming the chapter to work out what I wanted to ask in class, some days it is going back to something that did not land. Most often the best use of the time is exercises, but it varies.

To be clear, I am not saying one hour is the ideal. Ideally you read everything and do more. But in my experience most students do not get even one focused hour a day, and one focused hour a day across a semester takes you very far.

The students who do nothing until the end are the ones who cannot catch up. It shows in the exam, and it shows even more in how little they remember afterwards.

5. They explain it, to themselves or to someone else

This is really an extension of practicing, because it is still about applying what you know. The best students keep asking why, and so what, about the big things a course teaches. When they cannot answer, they have found a gap, and that is where the studying should go.

For many people a study group is the way to do it. Discussing it, presenting to each other, being asked the question you had not thought of.

I was never good at study groups. I am an introvert, and I preferred to study alone and go deep. So before exams I went for long walks and talked to myself about the course. I would articulate what it was really about, and answer the questions I expected to be asked, out loud, as if I were explaining it to someone else. It sounds odd. It is also the fastest way I know to find out exactly where the holes are.

The five, in short

1. Start with the question the course is trying to answer, and write it down in one sentence.
2. Get an overview of the course structure and previous exams in week one.
3. Practice more than you read, and simulate the real exam at least once, under real conditions.
4. Go to class and pay attention, and do one hour of deep focus every day rather than everything in the last three weeks.
5. Explain it out loud, to a study group or to yourself, until you find the gaps.

alice is built to help students learn more in less time, while enjoying it. Do these five steps and use alice to succeed at your studies. Try it here.