Med School TOPPER's SECRET to Studying Effectively (Detailed Breakdown)

people's biggest problem is that they can't remember what they study here's the simple truth most of you suck at studying and it's not really your fault we don't get taught how to learn we just kind of expect it to happen when we read something in fact there's so many study videos out there but no one shows us exactly what they do to learn understand and Ace exams like an exact practical every step of the way method my name is Zay oif I'm a third-year medical student and in this full guide on efficient learning I will

go through exactly what I do from the second I see topic to revising to at the end having it fully engraved in my mind ready for any question that I encounter in an exam I've spent 16 hours reading through countless papers three books all to create this full guide on efficient learning and honestly what I've learned and now understand has taken my ability to understand topics and remember them to the next level but here's the catch this guide is an active guide what that means is that I won't shy away at all from asking you

to recall what we've talked about or repeat things in spaced intervals I'll even give you practical actions that you can take right now while you watch this video because this isn't one of those videos that you have playing on the side and 5 minutes later it just goes over your head this is everything that you will need to completely transform your learning process so listen and train your mind in real time we'll split this guide up into four parts one priming the information two absorbing the information three retrieving the information and four spacing the information

all right immediately I'm going to ask you to write down the four steps that I've just mentioned and think about what they might mean think about how you use priming retrieval spacing in your own studying process and even though you have zero clue about what I could possibly include in any of these steps I can guarantee that you have some idea about what these words mean and you already have some idea about how you do them in your own studying and that's what's important here you're already thinking about your own learning process and thinking about

the ways it can be improved part one priming the information every time I study a new topic I've always scoped it out looked at the subtopics and generally skimm through it for 10 to 15 minut minutes before properly diving in but I was missing something huge an extremely key part of the process that I've just started to do in the last few weeks and it's already increased my speed so much and completely changed the way I learn let me explain it properly the way most of us learn is that we read one piece of information

a couple of times until it makes somewhat sense then we move on to the next concept we it for a couple of times then we move on to the next and by the time we're on the fourth one we barely remember what we R in the first and even after spending hours and days revising for an exam you still don't feel 100% confident you still feel like you're kind of okay with the understanding bit and that's what learning is like for most of us it's inefficient the information is a bunch of random points connected in

your head poorly understood and that's why you don't remember what you understand in the moment so what if I told you the solution was to flip it around get the entire structure of the chapter and the general concepts in your head and then start to read through it sounds a bit like what but see when we read something our brain doesn't just pick up the information in the exact way we've read it one fact input next input that's not how it works we can never take in those individual points or ideas unless we have something

to metaphorically connect it to and that's something when studying a new topic is to create a broad mental model of that topic or in other words an underlying way to think about each of those points and that's what the first step should be that's the aim of priming your information to build a mental model of all the concepts and ideas to do with that topic in your head it's the base for all of your future learning to build upon it's your version of the skeletal structure of the chapter that you make before you even start

to learn anything and I'll explain how you can do this in a three-step practical method notice that I've started this section off by giving you the overview first creating that base for you and now I'm going to dive into the details the very first thing you should do when learning something brand new is to scan the chapter skim read the different topics in there the bolded words the key sentences and side by side write down all the key words that you notice are prominent in that chapter it's just a simple list of 15 to 20

words words but and this is what I've started to do differently you can't just copy the words in the same structure that the chapter has been written the words you write down cannot be ordered in a specific way no neat list of bullet points so this is the title this is the subtitle these is this is the key word to do with this no your list needs to be completely unordered all the keywords jumbled up after reading some papers about the science behind learning and watching videos from Justin Sun Peter J Brown I realized that

even though I was doing full overviews skimming the chapters the subtopics before I started to learn the mistake I've been making and that's something that's probably slowed my learning down a lot is that I was studying using the author's structure the way the author has written out the chapter the way these textbooks have presented it to us when the reality is that the author hasn't written the chapter in a way for it to be best learned they just wanted to find a linear and simplified way to present it but our mind can't absorb information in

this linear way that's the reason when you read the textbook you actually don't understand something unless you repeat it like a billion times cell cycle first mitosis second and if you can't understand those things then you can't move on to anything else that's why you need to start with your plain unordered list to prevent the tendency and the bias to think about the chapters in the way that the author does and then once the list is made you look up any of the keywords that you have zero idea about like I'm talking zero clue so

you Google them read around them but don't spend more than 30 seconds on each of the words just understand what they mean and how they might relate to the rest of the concepts on your list don't start reading too deeply into one specific concept limit yourself to do this all for all the words in under 10 minutes and lastly now is when you use any prior knowledge that you have to think about how these different words ideas and Concepts within this chapter link together and then once you've thought about it make one mind map linking

all the concepts of the chapter and not like a basic bubbly mind map with a billing connections a lot of words before you make the Mind map you actually need to think about how it's going to be organized you need to split the words up and group them based on similarities or differences for example for diseases categorize them based on what part of the body they affect how does this disease relate to this this one what is the key difference between each of the groups of the mindmap the point is that it requires active effortful

thinking to make a good mind map like this and it'll require you to stand there and think okay how will this work how will these Concepts connect with each other how can I make sense of this in my mind and I'm new to doing this as well to be honest to start with I start I used to spend up to 30 minutes trying to think through and understand what the best way of creating this mind map was but literally after 2 weeks of doing this it's now a 15-minute activity and it's so so worth it

because it now speeds up every single part of the learning process that I have to do because then once you've already created this initial mental model of the entire chapter you've already actively thought about how the main concepts of the entire chapter work and Link together before you even even read anything a quick pause before the next section if you've enjoyed the video so far could you please leave a like could you please spam the comments you know help me out with the YouTube algorithm of it and tell me in the comments like what I

could improve tell me how this guy could be made better what guide you want next all of that and let's get back to the video the implications of this method so when you read parts of the chapter later with every subtopic every bullet point that you read you will start to think okay how does this link to that initial mental model I made is what I'm reading right now in line with what I initially thought does it make sense instead of you reading random points and forcing yourself to understand everything you read will automatically become

relevant to your brain and creating relevance is the only way that our brain learns if we can relate the new information to something and in this case that something is that us reading every concept every detail and then relating it back to that initial mental model that we created then that'll deepen our understanding more than anything and at the end practically I know my mental model could be completely wrong and I could be completely wrong about how I think the topics work but that doesn't matter what matters is the amount of effort of active effort

that I put in creating this mental model and thinking about the ways all the concepts could possibly link together if I'm right then great I'll keep on thinking about the Mind map this way and keep on building upon it and adding all the details onto it later and if not I can create a better understanding why was I wrong why did my model not make sense how can I make it make sense how did can I connect this and understand it in a better way either way I'm relating what I'm reading to that mental model

that mind map right from the start this is me priming myself and doing it like this has given me that basis to link everything to and there's nothing that has deepened my understanding of the the topics and the clinical knowledge I'm learning these days more than this step two the initial questions or pre-testing for the majority of the people the biggest reason that you're not getting the grades that you want to be getting is because you're not testing yourself enough according to Decades of empirical data from learning science Testing or retrieval practice which we'll talk

about properly promotes much much longer retention when compared to techniques like rereading highlighting making passive notes and interestingly studies now indicate that students that test themselves before even learning any of the topic perform significantly better compared to students who study double the amount of time and these students that tested themselves before the learning actually ended up getting 95 or up to 95% of the questions wrong so that means for example even if you do 20 questions before starting to learn the topic and get 90 to 95% of them wrong you will still end up doing

really well on the exam don't get me wrong you still have to do the testing after you actually study the knowledge that's the key part but practically speaking before I start learning I always start by testing myself using practice questions my go-to option is to practice around 15 to 20 mcqs before diving into the topic all of us have some form of pre-existing knowledge about the things that we're studying so it's very very important to at least attempt to practice these questions this firstly helps not only assess how much you know but points out the

specific weak topics and subtopics that you have no idea or are there you really struggle with that you need to give more Focus onto later on and secondly doing this helps with the way our brain process information because now we're linking from these questions whatever knowledge that we think about and force ourselves to remember from these questions we're linking it back to the initial mental model we're adding to the foundation and priming our brain even more with this initial practice this step three pre-reading before diving into any new topic in class if you don't want

to be sitting there confused about what's going on then pre-reading is something that you have to be doing is the final part of priming ourselves before we actually start to do the learning and to be honest my pre-reading is mainly just doing the first two steps and this is the point of the video where I ask you to pause and summarize or recall the first two steps of priming yourself how would you prime yourself before starting a topic what would you do this is testing in real time I know it's effort okay I'm going to

put up the summary right now anyways pre-reading is just an important practice that I think you need to have and I'm not saying to diligently pre-read every single day all I'm saying is that do pre-reading before doing a difficult chapter or assign one day of the week where you pre-read all the information upcoming information of the week skim the chapter create the initial mental model put effort into it watch a 5-minute video read through the basic concept for a little bit it's really not hard overall if you do it extensively and do it well it

might even take up less than 30 to 40 minutes because with this whole pre-reading priming thing if you think of your mind as a bucket pre-reading and priming fills the holes underneath the bucket and if you don't fill those holes and lay your base then no matter how much knowledge you keep pouring down into the bucket it'll keep falling through that's why it's so important I'd even say instead of using that Sunday or Monday night to catch up on the work that you missed the previous week I'd say use that night to pread on the

content of the next week because yes you won't catch up but you'll be in such a strong position for the upcoming week that you'll eventually create enough time and save enough time to do the catching up later on anyways and when you finally sit down to and if you've done all of these steps you'll be much more relaxed you'll feel less overwhelmed and then recall much faster as well and the reason I'm repeating this so many times before moving on to the next stage is because school doesn't teach us how to create a me good

mental model of the chapter before beginning it doesn't teach us to pre-read and do the work in a in a way that helps your learning in the future but the best part is once I'm done with these steps my Foundation is now ready for the learning and I'll be much foster at absorbing retrieving all of the future steps of provision part two absorbing the information now that we've primed ourselves skimmed the chapter done the initial questions what do we actually do while we read the information how can we best absorb it as we go through

it as I said previously my biggest piece of advice to both understand and remember information more effectively is to give meaning and relevance to it and yes while you read you could go on and explicitly keep asking yourself oh why is this information important what is the bigger picture how does this relate to this topic that's how I did it for a long time and it's helpful but you're still forcing connections the eight main concepts of the topic are all separate they're disorganized in your head and those true connections and those hot light bulb moments

only end up forming like hours in days of revision of a single topic later but now because we've created that initial mental model a good mind map of the topic all of the information that we read automatically becomes relevant these days I'm starting to have those aha moments those light bulb moments every few minutes because whenever I read anything new any new idea I think okay what part of my mental model my structure does this thing link to because when we read any anything new now any New Concept we will think okay how does this

link in with that initial mental model I created earlier that initial mind map if it doesn't Link in then why and I'm not saying that as you read you have to keep on adding on to that mind map and building on if you don't study with mind maps I don't either that's fine the pure Act of creating that mental model and that mind map and then thinking about how each part is organized is enough to accelerate your encoding and retrieval process and by the way there's a reason I keep repeating myself about this mental model

and the initial mind map that you have to create is because of how important it is and I will keep on repeating important principles in spaced intervals because that will is that is what will help you learn but the thing is even if you have built a foundation so opening up your book and reading from page one line one isn't an efficient way to do this that's why you need to read the information and absorb it in layers easiest to hardest step one layering and a practical method to do it I know we're used to

reading the textbook line by line rereading the pages again and again until it somehow sticks in our head but that's just not smart is it being someone who learns and studies a lot of stuff regularly I know that you can't just jump just straight into the details our brain isn't ready for them yet we need to add layers to the foundation and organize the way we take in the information easiest to hardest and that means when you're reading a chapter you start with the easiest layer of information skimming the chapter looking up keywords making a

general sense of the topics which is already what we've done in the priming section then the second layer of information will now involve going through general concepts getting the big overviews but at all costs avoiding getting into the details because if you get sucked into learning and memorizing the details your brain isn't ready to do that yet and it will get just get stuck the most effective use of your time would in this case be to use multiple resources Google Notes textbooks videos to get that General understanding and understand the main processes that this chapter

is talking about this is also the part where I usually start to create my recall questions while I go through the information side by side but I'll get into that in a minute after you got the general concepts in your head the second layer now is the time when you go through the the third layer the detailed Concepts the difficult topics and you go through them one by one and because you've already taken in the first layer and the second layer you'll realize that taking in these difficult Concepts even memorizing them isn't that hard anymore

and that's because you have such a good level of prior knowledge to then associate these difficult topics too in fact this is where your learning speed will actually triple because you already have that good mental model of the entire topic that you created earlier so you don't even need to read every single bit of the chapter anymore intuitively what you'll want to do is just skip through the entire chapter and go to the topics that you actually want to read more about what topics will help you gradually grow that mental model what doesn't didn't make

sense to you in that mind map you made what which bits do you want to read about more because once you invest thought and actively try and make that mental model initially you want to either confirm whether it's right or find out how it's wrong and then expand it throughout this layering process even you're building on your mental model even more step two creating recall questions this isn't really step two because I do this while I Wade through the actual information in the textbook and the notes in those layers but what I do side by

side is convert all the important explanations processes and details that I need to know for my exams into a list of questions and these are the questions I will then test myself on in my later revision sessions an important caveat here is if you already have PA papers and question Banks then creating these questions should be a supplement to your learning not the main source of you testing yourself but if you don't have them then instead of making notes while going through the information make questions I almost always have a document of my recall questions

opened up while I'm studying every few sentences of me reading I think what's important here what sort of questions can be asked about from this paragraph okay let's write down two questions down from this section and I make them very specific I don't just say oh what is this how is this I use words like Define name five of this analyze describe and by the end of this process I usually have a list of about 20 plus questions per subtopic and because I'm continuously making these questions while I go through the information a side benefit

is that I'm continuously engaged and I don't get stuck or bored or at least I'm less likely to and to be honest after you get in the practice and the flow of making these questions while you go through the information you can do it simultaneously because I go through the information and layers I think about how it relates to my mental model I think about why it's important give relevance to it do the whole absorbing bit while I also create these on the side if you're starting off then doing it simultaneously feels a bit overwhelming

for most people and that's completely fine what you should be focusing on at that point is to understand and build on those layers build on the initial concept map and then make the questions afterwards it's a bit more time consuming that way but I think that is the more effective method for beginners but my point is making those recall questions the list of those questions that you can then test yourself on later takes onethird of the time compared to making notes and once they're made you now have the perfect resource to test yourself on all

the information that you have to learn whereas with notes you can't really do that can you step three teaching everything and the thing is after doing all this work you kind of think that you know the topic 100% And I do this a lot as well but it's a misconception just because you look at the topic and recognize it doesn't mean that you have the ability to remember it long term that's just something called the illusion of competence what really brings you back to the reality of what you actually know is teaching it's known as

thean technique explaining it to a 5-year-old is the ultimate learning test isn't it except of course you don't have to kidnap a kid you can just explain it to yourself when you start to explain your mental model of the topic the main Concepts the details you get to see exactly where you're confused what part of the way that you think about this topic makes sense which parts are you hesitating to explain so after doing the reading of the chapter either after that F very first session or at the start of the second session I always

spend 15 to 20 minutes summarizing to myself teaching myself about all the main Concepts that I've learned starting from my Baseline all the way to every detail that I remember and it's this sort of small step that most people don't do that sometimes even I miss that really just takes your ability to remember something to the next level literally look at the subtopics use analogies pneumonics describe the main Concepts describe the disease in layman terms you making your brain use that concept to reconstruct it into an analogy or pneumonic is what really makes something memorable

when you explain something out loud it allows you to connect all these different things that you learn into one coherent monologue and that connects the points in your brain that are still unconnected it really solidifies everything part three retrieving the information this is an absolutely crucial part of the learning process all of the studies from Decades of research on learning science have shown us that testing yourself as a learning tool is far far more effective to help you remember and understand things when compared to practices like rereading summarizing making passive notes highlighting and there's full

studies on this from the majority of studies on learning science we know that the retrieval of information from your brain or in other words just testing yourself is something that makes your knowledge stick for far far longer when compared to just rereading or re-exposing yourself to the same material and by the way for you to remember most effectively that testing needs to be repeated in spaced intervals it can't just be a Mindless recitation of the same thing again and again and again and I'll talk about my formula for space repetition and how I do it

in the next section but out of the libraries of studies about testing yourself there's this one important study in 2010 that really takes this home a group of students were split into two one study the topic and then repeated that studying again using rereading highlighting whatever study the topic twice while the other group studied that topic once but then took a practice test before their exam and these were the results pretty insane differences right the group that just restudied the information didn't do that well with both facts and Concepts whereas the group that studied once

and then tested themselves on it did 30 to 35% better improved their Mark by that much and there are a ton more studies like this but this really gives us the importance of incorporating active recall into your routine testing should be your main form of revision but not only that but the biggest mistake people make is that they think okay I'll understand everything first and then I'll do practice questions but I want you to understand something you learn through the practice of these questions so incorporate this retrieval practice within your actual study sessions as well

when you go through your lectures and Textbooks For the First Time layering the information building on the concept that you had in the beginning you should continuously be asking yourself what are the key ideas what have I just learned which terms here are new to me what here relates to what I already know on my pre-existing knowledge of the topic a lot of what I was telling you to do in the previous steps a lot of the internal dialogue that we were having is also a part of retrieving the information another example of testing yourself

while you learn is covering the page and doing the classic cover page thing where you reme recall what you've just read my point is that every step of this retrieval process should involve testing yourself however now that we've gone through a big chunk of this guide we've gone through exactly what to do when we first start a topic how to go through it the first time and a bit of testing yourselves as well we've gone through in the first two big sections priming and absorbing the information so now what I want you to do is

to think about what we've learned so far and recall it think about what you remember from them again active test this is the summary up for both those sections now that you know exactly what to do in that first go through of the information we can now move on to what you're going to do to revise the information in the next sessions and what I do is I start every single revision session of mine with the recall question method the second time I come back to the topic what I always start off with is one

answering the list of questions I made without using any resources I try my very best to answer them like genuinely spend full minutes sitting there trying to Rack my brain remembering what I know because the more effort you put into formulating an answer in your head or writing it down on a paper the better your neural connections will form together the more you'll remember in the future and only after I've tried my best with three to four questions will I then go through the content go through the details and fill in my knowledge gaps my

understanding is better for the next time I go through the questions you see the reading of the content and doing the questions bit aren't two separate activities they need to be intertwined in the learning process and then the third part of this method is that you keep repeating this you test yourself on the questions go back to the learning material test yourself again go back to the learning material oh and for an extra optional step is to actually color code the questions based on the difficulty just quickly highlight them red orange green based on how

difficult you actually found them to point out your weaknesses as soon as you come to the topic so that in the next revision sessions you can immediately see the red questions and start with them rather than wasting time doing the green questions again and again and again and then slowly through the Rion sessions all of the questions that were read will turn from Orange to then green my tips for the recall question method or why it's better than flashcards as well by anyone that's usually talked to me or emailed me about this question recall method

I always get asked should I make answers with these questions as well and the thing is yeah people do this with flash cards but I personally think that with big concepts with heavy information that you have to absorb doing and writing out answers is just a big waste of time because you've literally made this list of questions from the textbook or the notes or a set resource and you can easily find the answers by going back to those or by searching them up on Google and the second big benefit for me I feel is that

when you actually answer these questions and are forced to go back to that original Source I feel like your revision is so much more effective as annoying as it is to not have your answers in one like page or place whenever you do test yourself in a question you don't you're not just clicking on the answer clicking the flash card and looking at one or two lines behind it you're going back to the original Source where there's a well explained answer in context with the other information you get to understand how this answer fits in

or links in with the other topics on the page and that in turn helps create that bigger picture of yours inter leaving for stem subjects a lot of people think that this method doesn't really apply to subjects like chemistry physics maths and it does except for one key difference you need to be able to interad the studying of different problem types the issue is that all of our textbooks give you a chapter on log equations for example they show you a practice example of how it works and then they give you 20 questions using the

exact same method and that doesn't really help us does it it's just Mindless repetition in the exam and in real life we need to have the ability to look at the question identify the method we want to use and then use that to solve it and the solution to this for us is simple once you're at a point where you vaguely understand the new problem type and know how to kind of get to the solution move on to the next problem type and Scatter this first problem type throughout the rest of your revision the Practical

action here is to still make that huge list of recall questions except only include one or two problems for each problem type so only one or two of the sign equations one or two of the angles of of a triangle type questions and so on and that's what you use to test yourself you're encountering different types of questions constantly you see exactly what you don't know and then no one's stopping you from going back to the textbook and learning and doing 20 of those same questions for the stuff that you didn't know how to solve

and that's what you should do once you've tested yourself and realized you don't know the method to this problem type you should go back to the textbook and practice as many of these questions as it takes to solidify this concept and truly understand it so that you don't forget it the next time part four spacing the information now the final step to long-term retention is spaced practice this means repeating and actively revising the topic but doing it in spaced intervals where the duration of repetition is increasing over time so the core idea is that you

would study something on day one then day four then day 14 and then day 40 and the reason this helps with allowing you to remember a lot more information than usual is because the more you allow yourself to forget the information the harder your brain will have to work and the better you'll be able to retrieve it and the reason this works so well with remembering things long term is the more you allow your brain to forget the information the harder it'll have to work to retrieve it and then the better you'll remember it our

brain forgets 50% of the stuff we understand within an hour and 70% of it is gone within a day and all of us have experienced this you revise the topic one day and the the next year's like what huh what did I even and we can use something called the forgetting curve to explain this over time we forget things at an exponential rate and the only way to learn those things and to remember them is to interrupt that curve with repetitions that basically means testing yourself or revising a topic just as you're forgetting it and

that's what space repetition in those intervals helps you do the problem with typical space repetition and I know it sounds simple but the problem the main issue that most students face with doing this is that even if you schedule space repetition and spread out the repetition of your of the topics that you have to do doing it with all of your topics is near impossible possible like it's not really hard to repeat two or three of the topics on day one then day four then day 14 but if you think about all the new things

that you're learning per week and that exponentially growing every time your repetition is also exponentially increasing it's not a doable technique then but there is a smart way to cleverly space your repetitions out and the obvious solution I found is to reduce the amount of repetitions you do per topic and to make each repetition session extremely effective this is the Practical action to be honest I already have a really good video on how I plan my space repetition out check it out right here but the gist of it is before I have an exam coming

up I start revision four to 5 weeks in advance and for challenging topics I think the strategy should be to get at least three repetitions in when you do your first repetition on day one then do your second one on day three or four and then you do your final one at least 2 weeks after that for me this works so well because each interval I have each Gap is big enough that it allows me to actually forget the topic that I've learned and then makes that testing session next time a lot more effective for

Less challenging topics only give them one or two repetitions one on the actual day where I learn it and one maybe 12 to 14 days later the reason I've made the decision to reduce the repetitions on the easier topics and not do three or four repetitions that would make it 100% and solidify it 100% is because I need to prioritize my time my weaker topics need a lot more repetitions than the easier ones the reality of efficient studying and active recall increasing my efficiency and learning these methods that allow me to study more effectively has

no doubt single-handedly taken my exam performance to the next level it allows me to study less score better and it's probably the reason I'm in med school right now but the big mistake I used to fall into was to think that efficient studying and testing myself is the only way and the only effective worthwhile way to revise because yes it would be incredible if I could force my brain to put huge amounts of effort 100% concentration into the work every single time I revise but realistically if you're studying week after week there's going to be

days there's going to be times where you don't feel like going 100% and studying actively and using 100% of your brain and yeah the issue was that I'd convinced myself that the only way to make studying worthwhile to make it a worthwhile use of my time is if it was active and effective so much so that I would procrastinate for days and not catch up on my work because it was such an effortful task but what I wish I realized and thought back to again was that there's easier more relaxed ways that you could still

put the hours of learning into like Light reading watching YouTube videos just even rereading the concept like it is okay to do sometimes like you're allowed to just learn in a not strict way you know and the solution was this was a balance 70% of the time you do the active studying you put in the effort into your learning and then 30% of the time you do whatever you can that gets you through the actual revision that you have to do and in the long run I think this 70 to 30% balance is what has

truly helped me stay consistent and motivated in my revision anyways that was the full guide on how to self-study efficiently for your exams we started off with how you should first look at the information to revising it to now knowing it so well through so much recall and practice that I am so sure that you'll be able to Ace the exams this is another full guide I made on how any student can learn to focus for long long hours using the steps I've given and this is that space repetition video I mentioned where I go

through my exact formula my exact space repetition revision timetable that month before the exam anyways thank you so much for watching I really hope that You' gained value from this video I hope you can use this to improve your own studying method leave a like spam the comments below share it with your friends and I will see you in the next next one