How To Use AI To Study For Exams - With Demo

Hi everybody. This is Tom and in this video, which is a video I've been wanting to record for quite some time, I want to talk about how to use AI most effectively uh to study study any topic. Um I come from a medical background, so this is mostly my experience of studying medicine, but you could use this to study pretty much any kind of uh topic that you need to revise for your exams.

So let's start with this. Uh this is how to use AI and I need to start by outlining my general strategy for um exam preparation because this this is how we fit AI into the study strategy. So I need to outline that to start with.

So first you have all these resources. So there's lots of different places where you'll get information that you need to study to learn for your exams. And uh your exams will be based on lots of different things.

Your experience uh you know in uh small group discussions, lectures, books, um maybe online resources. So there'll be lots of different things. So you've got like books, lectures, uh you might have some like you know papers that you get online, some research papers and so on.

And then you have your what I call the external database. So what the external database is is basically a set of notes. It's like a folder where you keep everything you need to learn.

This set of uh notes or this external database needs to be really simple. It needs to be really easy to read through and absorb information from and you need to be able to get through it quickly and it's well organized into topics that you can sit down and study in 1 to three hours. So the purpose of the external database is to transfer it to the internal database.

So this is your brain. Uh let's just draw a bad illustration of a brain. So what you're doing with this process is you're taking books, lectures and papers and so on, transferring them and organizing in in the external database and then transferring things from the external database to your internal database.

There will be some learning directly from the resources. Um, so when you're sat in lectures, when you're reading papers and things, you'll be absorbing stuff, but really what you need is spaced repetitions of going over this content, and that's how you absorb things into your memory. Um, the issue is what is the most valuable activity when it comes to learning and for your exams?

This is where you want to spend as much time as you possibly can. This process is a waste of time as it doesn't directly create uh the knowledge that you need in order to get through the exams. This is where you want to be spending all of your time.

All your energy should be trying to get stuff to stick in your brain. any time that you're wasting sort of organizing notes, making beautiful illustrated notes, um transferring stuff to the external database is a waste of time because your external database is external in your exams other than some very specific exams. In your exams, you won't have access to your notes.

When you then go in to do a job, whatever that job is, if it's medicine, you're not going to have your set of notes when you're doing ward rounds, when you're seeing patients, what really matters is what's in your internal database. So, you really, really want to spend most of your time transferring stuff from an external database to an internal database. I can't stress this enough.

That's why I'm kind of repeating myself a bit here. So how but the problem is you've got all these books, lectures, research papers, small group discussions. You've got all of these different resources and they're not well organized for you to study from.

So what do you do? Well, this is where AI can help. So the the process of putting everything from all these complex resources to a single organized place for you to learn from, that's where AI is useful.

So you're you're using AI to speed up the process of making your external database so you can transfer it to your internal database. So let's start by looking at complex textbooks. One of the issues when you're studying any topic um any subject uh particularly medicine um is that the textbooks and the resources that are available can be so complicated and so difficult to understand.

It can make you feel kind of stupid, frustrated, like you're not making any progress. I had this experience so many times in medical school where I was trying to study from a textbook and I just couldn't understand what the author was trying to say. The language was just too complex.

The sentences were structured badly. um everything was just designed in a way that the textbook was kind of the author showing off how clever they were rather than providing a useful way of of actually learning the content for the first time. So what I did when I finished medical school and finished my foundation training was I tried to create simple textbooks that have all the detail, have all the complex information, but they're really it's really simplified.

And that's what these zero to finals textbooks are for medicine. So the idea is that they're really simple and easy to study from. However, you may not be studying medicine.

Uh you may have a particular textbook that uh they say that you need to use for your exams. Um there may be some topics that you find are not covered in the zero to finals book so far. For example, dermatology.

And so you're still left with these complex textbooks and um you need to learn from them. So this is where AI comes in. So let let me give you a demonstration.

I'm going to use the zero to finals textbook because I don't want to get uh you know called up for uh putting other people's uh textbooks on the internet. But you could use any really complex big fat thick textbooks that are difficult to learn from. just do exactly the same process with them.

So, this is what you do. So, you open your phone. If you've got an iPhone, this is how I do it, but I'm sure there's a solution for Android and the other phones is open a folder on your phone and then you click this button and you put uh scan documents and then you go to whatever topic you're trying to learn.

So, for this one, we're going to do hypothyroidism. And you just hold it over the page, it'll scan that. Then you hold it over the next page, it'll scan that.

Then you hold it over the next page. And then you just save that document. And it gets saved.

And we'll call this one hyperthyroidism. So that's now saved in my phone and uh on iCloud. And then what you can do is you can simply drag that file onto you can go on your computer go to I like using Grock at the minute but chat GBT is another option.

And there's lots of options and probably in 6 months the options will be completely different but for this demonstration I'm using Grock. You can tr you can just drag that uh PDF file across and then you can put in a very simple a simple prompt like make concise and easy to study notes from this document on hyperthyroidism. put that in and the AI will then analyze a document and pick out the important points and make it easy for you to study.

So, if you've got a uh a re a paper or sorry, a textbook that's got really dense, difficult to understand information, the AI will give you these kind of really straightforward notes that you can see on here. So this makes it really easy to study this quickly. And then you can simply copy this text.

Okay? And then you can just paste that into a document and you have all of those notes. The other thing you can do now if you need to is uh you can say please create short answer questions with answers based on this content.

So there you can create some short answer questions that you can use to test yourself on this content before Uh so we copy and paste this again. So there you can create some short answer questions that you can use to test yourself on uh this same content. And then you can also create please create multiplechoice questions best of five answers on the same content.

can also create multiplechoice questions based on the same content. So this way you have short answer questions, then you have your information, your notes there to do read and recall with and you have multiple choice questions to test your knowledge afterwards. So this way you've created an external database really quickly from a complex textbook um on the information you need for your exams.

Um so let's just document that kind of uh that process. So what you do is you do a photo of the book. Then you use this photo to do a PDF.

Then you you take that PDF and you put it into the computer. uh to the AI model and that gives you uh short answer questions, notes and multiple choice questions. And that way you now have your external database.

So this is your external database which you can use to study from. So you can do the same exactly the same process. This could be um your lectures, your lecture slides.

It could be a paper. So, let's say you want to have notes on a condition like psoriasis. You could go on to uh Google or PubMed, type in psoriasis review paper, and that will produce a review paper that looks at kind of the latest evidence for things.

And you can then put that into the AI and say make notes in exactly the same way. So then what do you do with this external database? You'll be familiar with all of this stuff from previous videos if you've watched those.

But basically, you're then organizing into uh topics. So let's say you're doing endocrinology. You would organize all these different topics like hypothyroidism, hypothyroidism, Cushing's disease.

All of that gets organized into an endocrinology topic. And that topic is something you can study in 1 to three hours and you do something called uh the testing sandwich. This is my technique for learning any kind of topic.

When you sit down for a study session, you do first the short arms of questions, then you do read and recall, which I've done a whole video about, and then you do multiple choice questions. Uh you then do this with spaced repetition meaning that you uh do the testing sandwich for one topic say today and then you would repeat that again in say a week then you repeat it again in say 6 weeks and then you can repeat it say every six months after that and these space repetitions help the information to stay with you and you also track your progress so you get your scores from the short answer questions and the multiple choice questions. Put those in a tracking table and watch that tracking table grow over time as you do your space repetitions and cover everything ready for your exams.

I hope that video was helpful. Sorry, probably not my my finest video. Um I've got really quite a nasty cold.

It just keeps flaring up and it's kind of interrupting my thought process and I'm not as sharp as I usually am. But I wanted to get this video out there. If you want to download kind of a nice neat version of these scribbles that I've been doing on the side that explains the process, you can download them at uh on the Zero to Finals Patreon, which also gives you access to the Zero to Finals member site where you can find short answer questions, multiple choice questions, my course on how to learn medicine, and everything else.