How to study for an exam in one day (damage control)

To study for an exam in one day, triage first: find the topics worth the most points and let the rest go. Then spend the day testing yourself instead of rereading, in focused blocks with breaks, and stop early enough to get a full night's sleep. You won't learn the material as well as you would have over a few weeks, but one well-planned day can still rescue a lot of points.

So. The exam is tomorrow. You and this subject had a whole semester together, and somehow you never found the time. No point rehashing that now. Here's how to get through the next 24 hours, and how to make sure you never have this kind of date again.

Be honest about what one day can do

Cramming is worse than spacing your study out; that's one of the best-supported findings in learning research. In 2013, John Dunlosky and four colleagues reviewed the evidence on ten popular study techniques for the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Only two earned their highest rating: practice testing and distributed practice (spreading study over time). Highlighting and rereading, two techniques students rely on heavily, landed in the low-utility pile.

Distributed practice is off the table today. Practice testing isn't, and it's your best tool. So set a modest, realistic goal: walk in knowing the material most likely to be on the exam well enough to use it under pressure. Forget the whole course. Aim for the exam.

Triage: find the points

Before you open a single chapter, spend 20 to 30 minutes working out where the points are:

• Gather the evidence. The syllabus, the teacher's study guide, past exams, homework and quizzes, and whatever got repeated in class. Teachers tend to test what they emphasized.
• List the topics. Usually five to ten.
• Rank them with two questions: how much is it likely to be worth, and how well do you already know it? Topics worth a lot that you half-know go first, because they're the cheapest points available. Topics worth a lot that you don't know at all come second. Small topics you don't know go last, or nowhere.
• Budget the time. Write a number of minutes next to each topic and add them up. If the total is bigger than the day, cut from the bottom of the list, never from your sleep.

A plan for the day

A sample, assuming you start in the morning (slide it later if you start after school or work):

1. Triage (30 minutes).
2. Block 1, your top topic (45 minutes): skim the notes once, close them, write out everything you can remember, then check.
3. Break (10 minutes, away from the desk).
4. Block 2, the next topic, same method.
5. Repeat down your list, with a longer break for a real meal every two or three blocks.
6. Late afternoon: a mixed self-quiz. Questions from every topic, shuffled. Write down each one you miss.
7. Evening: the mistakes list. Go over only what you got wrong, then make a one-page summary sheet.
8. Stop at a reasonable hour and go to bed.

Put your phone in another room for every block; how to focus while studying has the research on why distance helps. If you like working against a timer, 25-minute Pomodoros fit this plan well.

Test yourself, don't reread

Rereading your notes feels productive because everything looks familiar. Familiar is not the same as being able to write it on a blank exam page.

A classic 2006 experiment by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke shows the trap. College students learned short texts, then either restudied them or wrote down everything they could recall. Restudying came out ahead only when the final test was five minutes later. When the test came two days or a week later, the material students had practiced recalling was remembered better. Your exam is tomorrow, not in five minutes.

How to do it fast:

• Blank page. For each topic, write everything you remember, then check against your notes and fill the gaps in another color.
• Past exams and practice problems. Do them without looking at the solutions, then grade yourself honestly.
• Flashcards for definitions, formulas and dates. Say the answer before you flip.
• Explain it out loud as if to a classmate who missed the lesson. Where you stumble is where you study next.

Sleep beats the all-nighter

The all-nighter feels heroic. The research doesn't agree.

• In a study led by UCLA researchers, 535 high school students kept daily diaries for two weeks at a time in 9th, 10th and 12th grade. On days after they gave up sleep to study more than usual, they had more trouble understanding what was taught in class and were more likely to struggle on a test or assignment (Gillen-O'Neel, Huynh and Fuligni, 2013).
• In a 2007 brain-imaging study from Matthew Walker's lab (Yoo and colleagues), one night without sleep reduced activity in the hippocampus, a key memory region, while people learned new material, and they retained less of it afterward.
• In a 2008 survey of 120 students at St. Lawrence University, Pamela Thacher found that 60 percent had pulled at least one all-nighter in college, and that all-nighters went with lower grade point averages. That's a correlation, not proof, but it points the same way as everything else.

So stop studying about an hour before bed, do one last pass over your mistakes list, and sleep. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 8 to 10 hours for teenagers and at least 7 for adults. If it's already late, go to bed anyway and look at your summary sheet in the morning.

If exam stress keeps you up night after night, or the anxiety feels bigger than the exam itself, that needs more than a study plan. Talk to someone you trust or a school counselor, and if you need help right now, our support page lists free helplines.

The morning of the exam

• Eat something, even if it's small.
• Review your one-page summary and your mistakes list. No new material.
• Quiz yourself on the top three topics for ten minutes.
• Leave early enough to arrive without sprinting.
• In the exam, skim the whole thing first, answer the questions you're sure of, then go back for the rest. If wrong answers don't cost points, don't leave anything blank.

How not to end up here again

You'll survive tomorrow. After that, it's time for the talk: you and last-minute studying should start seeing other people.

Next time, the fix is a calendar. The day you get the next exam date, schedule three or four short review sessions spread over the weeks before it, each one starting with a self-quiz. How to make a study schedule has a template, and if the real problem is that you never start, how to stop procrastinating is your next read. Toxic Coach can handle the nagging: set the exam as a goal with a deadline, and the reminders escalate as it gets closer.