How To Finish 6 Months of Study In 72 Hours

so you've got an exam coming up in 3 days and you haven't started studying at all what can you do to get the best grade possible in this video I'm going to teach you how you can study a huge amount in a very short period of time to be clear I'm not encouraging you to cram for an entire exam in just 3 days but knowing how to cover a lot of volume in a short period of time is a useful skill if you're new to this Channel and you're wondering who I am I'm Dr Justin

Sun I'm a learning coach in the head of learning I can study I'm also a former medical doctor and for the last decade I've helped thousands of people learn more efficiently which does sometimes include doing some hyper cramming before we jump in I'd appreciate if you give this video a like it really helps with the algorithm which my life is at the mercy of so why 3 days well there's a funny story actually back when I was in my third year of medical school there was this paper that I was studying for and I actually

completely forgot that this paper even existed and I know what you're thinking thinking how can you forget that a paper even exists well at the time I was actually using a previous student notes as my primary source of studying I wasn't going to lectures anymore and this student just decided not to write any notes with this particular paper so I just didn't like I just forgot I just forgot that the whole paper existed until 3 days before the exam yes I understand it was really dumb I've been very dumb for a very long long part

of my life and so for that 3 days before the exam I studied a lot like in 72 hours I probably studied 60 of those hours and I ended up getting the worst mark that I ever received in medical school which was a C+ which I think is like a 65% or something but the thing is I was actually quite lucky because that particular exam and that particular paper was very very fact recoil heavy so I could rely on a lot of just Plano root memorization and still managed to pass funnily enough that very paper

the next year changed the way that they were examining so that you would no longer have been able to do that the questions got way more complicated way more Nuance like if you didn't properly understand it you wouldn't have done very well also potentially not surprising I don't remember anything about that paper anymore in fact I remember so little about that paper I don't even remember what the paper was on like I have a vague memory of remembering something to do with the pancreas and that's it maybe was the gallbladder anyway I've learned a lot

more about how to study effectively since then and I'm going to teach you the right method of cramming if you've got limited time without spending like 20 hours a day studying so for the first thing about cramming the right way is to understand that you're in a compromised position anyway you got to lose something and you have to be strategic about what you're going to lose if you haven't started studying for something 3 days before your exam and you're expecting to still do really well you're either a genius or you're delusional I'm just going to

let you decide which one you are and a big thing that helped me understand how to crme the right way was actually getting trained on creating assessment questions myself as an educator I've realized what goes on behind the scenes when they're creating an exam paper how they thinking about what the test you want because if you can think like the examiner you increase your chance of studying the right thing now most places most institutions will create exam questions based on some kind of framework and common one would be like Bloom's revised taxonomy or solo taxonomy

or really any variation but they follow the same general principles there are usually different orders and levels of thinking and they're trying to assess you on those as a very general summary lower order methods of thinking and learning these tend to be a lot more isolated whereas the higher order levels tend to be much more integrated and there's something of a spectrum in between so it's the first piece of helpful information now the the second thing is to know that most institutions in most countries are legally obligated to test you on the learning objectives now

they don't have to test you on every single learning objective and what Falls within the scope of a learning objective can be quite a gray area sometimes but they're still a useful guide to work off and most examiners are going to think like this there's a list of learning objectives that they have for that particular subject let's say that there are three for one lecture and they're going to be thinking how can they test these learning objectives at these different levels of learning so already this helps to narrow down our focus a little bit for

example if we have a topic around Greek history then we might get asked a question at a lower order that's like described the major events and significance of the Greco Persian Wars who were the key leaders and what were the key battles and outcomes of this conflict whereas for the same subject a mid order question might be something like like analyze the social and political structure of Athens during the time of Pericles how did pericles's leadership impact the Athenian democracy culture and Empire Building efforts you can see that it sign they compare and contrast multiple

ideas against each other compared to the really higher order questions which might sound a little bit more like evaluate the influence of Greek philosophy on the development of West and thought discussed the contributions of Socrates Plato and Aristotle and how their ideas shaped not only ancient grease but also subsequent intellectual philosophical traditions so now it's not just about examining different ideas against each other but now you have to create a value judgment about how important the contribution of each of these ideas and relationships are on each other it's more than just knowing that there are

differences and similarities it's understanding the significance of them if we use another example like microbiology then we could have a lower order equ that sounds like explain the differences between procaryotic and eukariotic cells with examples of microorganisms that belong to each category and describe their basic structural characteristics relatively straightforward fact recall quite isolated a mid-order question instead might sound a little bit more like discuss the role of microorganisms and biogeochemical cycles focusing on the nitrogen and carbon Cycles how do bacteria and AA contribute to nutrient cycling in ecosystems and what are the ecological implications of

these processes again you can see now we're looking at comparing different concepts and ideas with each other but we don't have the idea of significance that comes through the higher order version which might sound like critically evaluate the use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture analyze the challenges of antibiotic resistance its mechanisms and the potential consequences for public health and propose strategies to address the issue of antibiotic resistance effectively that's a super broad question incredibly complicated but again you see that they're asking you about the consequence the significance the importance of these interaction actions so

this is going to be the pattern across the board any lecture objective they can test you on a direct immediate fact recall very isolated they can ask you about comparisons with related other Concepts or objectives or they can ask you about the significance of them again they don't necessarily have to ask each of these depending on your curriculum sometimes the lecture objectives are actually written in a way that indicates what level they're interested in so for example the lecture objective might actually say that what they want from you is to be able to describe the

something something something which suggest that it's a lower water Mastery they're looking for whereas if the lecture objective uses words like discuss evaluate contrast these are indications that they want that higher order flare and so when you scan through electure objectives you can actually get a reasonably good map for how they're likely to test you now remember you're going to lose something you're not going to be able to cover every single question there are going to be things that you miss but this is is a more strategic way of using your time it increases the

probability of getting more questions correct but this is still not enough because even then especially if you've got a Content dense curriculum it's going to be very overwhelming and this is where the idea of logic comes in how can we help our brain figure out what the right answer is even when it doesn't actually know the right answer I mean it's kind of a fancy way of just saying how can we guess more accurately and so if we look at how our brain is able to make logical deductions it can be even more strategic how

we spend our time cramming let me explain our brain has a network of knowledge it's able to use this network to make inferences about new information and new problems so let's say you didn't study everything and the test question is now asking you about some piece of information that is missing from your network well if you've got enough connections that are surrounding in it you can logically infer the answer this is something that might be called deduction or logical reasoning and so obviously if you've got more knowledge and more things surrounding the Gap then it's

easier to make the inference for example if the only thing that you're missing is the second step of a process but you know the first step and the third step and you know what goes in and you know what comes out you might logically be able to figure out what happens in the middle to make it from input and output and here's a really strategic part when it comes to cramming is that not all information is the same value from a logical reasoning perspective we can always think about each piece of information having like logic

points the more logic points something has the more useful it is in figuring out other things typically these are going to be the major Concepts principles rationals on the other hand if you have something that is low level of logic points then this is going to be like a very very detailed technical piece of information like for example a particular constant for an equation or the particular micrometers or the tubule this is information which might come up somewhere but there's limited ways that you can use this information to logically deduce other knowledge gaps and so

this gives us the basis for our hyper cramming strategy we want to use our time to figure out what are the learning objectives what are the and levels of learning that they're likely to assess us on for each of these objectives and then what are the pieces of information that give us the most logical deduction power I.E which pieces of information have the highest logic points now you might be wondering how do you even know what the logic points of something are and the answer is that until you really spend more time to study which

you don't have time to do by the way you're not really going to know so you have to make your best guess the good good news is that your best guess is probably going to be reasonably accurate all you have to do is as you're reading the lecture slides or the coursebook or whatever resources you're studying from you ask yourself how valuable is this piece of information at helping me explain other things in the topic how helpful is it at making sense of multiple other things in the topic and you will generally be able to

say okay well this seems like it might Maybe be related to some other things or you might read it and think this seems really specific and it's probably not going to be very relevant and so what you do is you just ignore the things that seem like they're not going to be as relevant and you just start with the things that feel like they are connected to more pieces and it doesn't really matter if you miss a few things because first of all again you've got limited time you got to pick your losses but the

other thing is that you might get three pages down and realize something you skipped earlier actually is really related like it directly explains this other thing that you're now reading about well that's fine you can just always go back and then learn it now but the key is to be quite aggressive with filtering what information is helping you reason about the topic and which information is something that you might just end up having to wrot learn and memorize which you've got limited time for and that's the type of thing that you should really have for

the last night of cramming rather than day one of a 3-day cramming stretch so here is how I would schedule it if you've only got 3 days day one spend about one or 2 hours of that time which I know it seems like a lot of time but it's well worth it scoping through the topic to pick out what are the learning objectives and what are the orders of learning that they're probably going to test me on this is going to give you a bit of filter for when you're reading the information so you can

make sense of how important it is and how much time it's worth investing into it in the first place you might sometimes find entire lectures where every single learning objective is very very lower order and memorization heavy this is the type of lecture that you might want to just completely skip on this first day and come back to later it's kind of like a nice to have on the other hand you might realize that only two or three lectures are really really dense and asking you about the higher water things and you've got like another

10 or 20 lectures that are all much simpler much faster and the learning objectives for it seem much simpler in lower order in that case the right strategy might be to put the higher water of stuff off first and just go through the simple lectures because most places you will have to be tested on every lecture at least once in fact I remember when I was in unique one of my friends skipped the hardest five lectures of Bio chemistry like these five lectures would have taken like the same amount of time to study as all

the other lectures combined for that topic and they managed to get an A minus without studying the hardest lectures at all they only focused on the simplest lectures and because they knew that as a percentage all of these lectures have to be tested at least once they just moed up a bunch of those easy points and they let themselves just figure out the rest with the hardest lectures to get like you know 20 or 30% of those questions right but the moral of the story here is that when you're clear about the learning objectives and

you're clear about the different orders that they're likely to test you on it makes you have a much better judgment about what is relevant and what is not so it's time very worthwhile to spend after you do that go through the lectures and keep that filter in your mind ask yourself how connected as this information to everything else does it give me more logical reasoning and deduction ability and make a guess on how many logic points it has spend your time to learn the things that have the highest logic points only for as much of

that paper as you can you want to cover as many lectures as possible focusing only on the stuff that has the highest logic points and to be honest if you can do that there is a really good chance that with that alone you could pass because especially if it's a multiple choice question youve increased the chance of guessing the right answer from maybe like a 25% random selection to a 45% but we still have day two and so on day two we're going to do the exact same thing as day one but now on the

slightly lower level of logic points these are the things that you skipped on the first day still not those really really detailed things but the parts that feel like they are maybe a little bit more important but definitely not as important as the stuff that you covered on day one and again go through as many lectures as possible filling that out and again I know it's scary to keep just skipping all of this content but You' got to lose something and again you have to pick your losses and so for day three we're going to

spend this time looking at the learning objectives looking at the different orders that they're going to test you on and asking yourself are there any really obvious gaps that I haven't been able to fill yet and if you've got some more time try to cram in using flash cards or Memory Palace techniques all the tiny little details that you might need to pick up and just get through as many of those details as possible if you can't get through them more no big deal you're already putting yourself in the best possible position anyway and what

you'll find is that when you walk into the exam you're not really going to be that confident for any question but overall your chances of getting the right Mark are going to be relatively High because you can figure out a lot of things you can logically reason the right answers if you like this approach you thought it was interesting and you want to learn more methods like this then this as well as basically everything else I talk about in all my videos are covered in my guided learning program this is a stepbystep guided training program

that distills a decade of my experience teaching people to learn more efficiently so that you can have the smoothest and easiest and most error-free path of becoming more efficient learner if that sounds appealing to you then you can check that out at ion study.com there's a link in the description now this method of criming is actually really beneficial for some other reasons as well first of all it really helps to figure out that logic Point scoring because it trains your brain to be more Discerning with the information this is a really important part of deep

processing which is in other words how intelligent you are and that's something that you can train I talk about that a lot more in my video around learner types and the other thing is that if you have more days like 4 days or 5 days or 6 days or seven days or maybe even like you know like a whole semester to study for it you can actually use the exact same approach but you just spend longer on each of the days but the phases and what you're focusing on in each phase of study Remains the

Same in the first phase whether that's one day or seven days we're focusing on the higher logic Point items and then on the second phase we're focusing on the mid logic Point items and in the third phase AKA maybe the few weeks before the exam or few days we're going to be going through lecture objectives looking at the different orders that we might be tested on looking for gaps and then mopping up all those little details that we'd have to rot memorize that we're only going to remember for a few days anyway and so that

is the most cognitively beneficial way of cramming again I'm not saying you should cram but if you're going to do it you may as well do it the right way