So, you want to get an “A” in this class, do you? Well, here are some tips for you. Hopefully you’ve stumbled across this page weeks before the first midterm, so you’ll be able to adequately follow all the steps. If, however, it’s midnight the night before the exam and you’re just looking at your notes for the first time, you might want to skip to the end where I talk about cramming. Don’t cram. It sucks and you get all tired and irritated and whatnot. Good luck!

Step 1: Come to class!
This seems like a no brainer, I know, but you’d be surprised at how many people miss class. I know the thought process–”Adrienne puts her lectures online…I’ll just miss lecture and go over the notes on my own!” Bullshit. You know as well as I do that you won’t go over the notes. You’ll promise yourself that you will, but something will come up (it always does) and suddenly it’s weeks later and you still haven’t looked at the lecture. Besides, you’ll miss my in-depth commentary and glowing personality. Honestly, what else do you really have to do during class time? You paid for this, you set aside time in your schedule to be here, you may as well show up. Plus, coming to class ensures you hear the information at least once, telling your brain that you need to know it. It makes studying much, much easier.

Step 2: Take notes!
Once again, I know my notes are up on the web. However, I wrote down all the stuff you need to know. Only you can write down ways for you to remember it, things you need to look up, questions you want to ask, interesting tidbits and whatnot. If you write down notes about what I say, you’re not only hearing my lecture, you’re writing it down in your own words. This lets your brain know that you actually want to remember this stuff. You’ll remember much, much more if you take notes than if you don’t.  Lifehack.org just published a nice article on how to take effective notes. Read and love!

Step 3: Record the lecture and listen to it again!
Ok, here’s how your brain works: you remember every little thing you see, hear, smell, taste and feel throughout the day. When you sleep at night, your brain sorts through all this stuff and gets rid of the things it thinks it won’t need later on. The stuff it keeps is stuff that affected it deeply (strongly sensed), and things it saw more than once during the day. If you come to my lecture, listen and take notes, then don’t look at it again before you go to sleep, your brain is going to assume you don’t need all that info. Have you ever noticed that as soon as you leave class you seem to know everything the teacher said by heart? Then 24 hours later you remember maybe 3% of the information. Suck! However, if, right after class, you get to hear the lecture one more time, then your brain will know that what you just heard is extremely important and you need to remember it. 24 hours later, you’ll have in depth recall of 95% of the lecture rather than 3%. How easy was that?!? All you did was listen to the lecture while driving home! Or doing the dishes! Or brushing your teeth! It’s like passive studying. Trust me! It works wonders. Do it!

Step 4: Make up a fake test
Do you want to know how I come up with exam questions? I look at each slide from my lecture, and make up as many multiple choice questions from that slide as I can. Then when quiz or exam time comes around, I randomly choose questions from this list to put on the test. If you were to go though my lecture slides and come up with as many multiple choice questions as you could, you would probably come up with the same ones I did. Then, right before the exam or quiz, you give yourself a test consisting of all the questions you made up. This will help you remember all the thousands of facts I’m throwing at you, and help you identify the areas that you need to work on. Take a fake test every Friday on the stuff we did that week. The weekend before the exam, take all the questions you’ve written and try and answer them. You’ll be very, very prepared.

Step 5: Don’t cram for hours!
Yes, you’ve heard this before. Don’t stay up late the night before and cram. Seriously! Don’t do it! Remember how I told you about your brain? Well, another secret is your brain can get pissed at you. It’s a vindictive little organ, and if you abuse it too much, it’ll do sneaky things during the exam like make you forget everything you ever knew about respiration, and instead kick up all the names of the Brady Bunch kids or something. Bastard! Your brain needs time to go through everything it’s seen in a day, and it does that when you’re sleeping. Stick to a normal study schedule and you’ll finish the test in 20 minutes, I promise!

Step 6: Read the book (or the web, or whatever)
The more ways you see the information presented, the better your brain will be able to process it. You’ve looked at the lecture notes. You’ve listened to my beautiful voice talk about interesting things (at least twice). Now read about them. If you didn’t buy the book, Google the information. Wikipedia is a great resource. Just read about the subject somewhere, anywhere. Trust me, one hour of reading equals 8 hours of cramming later on.

Oh, crap. I have to cram.

So you didn’t study right, did you? You figured that you could wait until the weekend before the test and sail on through? Huh. Here’s the thing–Biology is all facts. Literally. You have to memorize everything I say, because I’m going to ask you about it in class. No, you can’t memorize  12 hours of lecture in one weekend. So what do you do? One, pray to the exam gods. They just might show mercy. Then, use my official steps for cramming:

1. Promise me you won’t do it again! This is going to suck.

2. Say goodbye to friends and family for the next couple of days/hours/minutes. You’ll need all the time you can get.

3. Go through all my lectures and make up questions for each slide. Make up as many as you can and make them as hard as you can (see step 4 above). Give yourself this test over and over again.

4. If you have tapes of my lectures (and you better, buddy!), listen to them constantly. No music, no TV, just my gorgeous voice on your player droning on and on about the wonders of biology. Play this every second you are doing something else (except sleeping). I expect to be talking to you in the shower!

5. Sleep at least 8 hours a night. Your brain has to transfer all this information it’s getting from your short-term memory into your long-term. It needs sleep to do this. Get some!

6. You will have lots of facts you just can’t seem to remember. Lots of them. Choose what you think are the most important and make up flash cards. Practice with these flash cards.

7. Right before the exam, drink caffeine. Caffeine ups short term memory temporarily, so have a shot (or several shots) of espresso and then go through your flash cards. You’ll remember some of them.

8. Guess. There are four answers for every multiple choice questions. You have a 25% chance of getting the question right if you guess. Of course, that’s a 75% chance of getting it wrong, but you know that and you’ll study next time, right?

9. Study next time!!!