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Exam Study Tips for University & A-Level students - Revision Q&A with Cambridge students

2018-05-02 · Q&A video · Ali, Paul, Katherine, a guest · recording, 25:41 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Answering questions · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, Family, His own numbers

In the last part of his 10,000-subscriber revision Q&A, Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, gives four tips for university exams (scope your subject, base essay revision on essay plans, use past papers for maths and physics, befriend students in the years above), then he, Paul and Katherine answer questions on revision timetables, workload, reading lists, notes, stationery and revising during Ramadan.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Third part of the revision Q&A series and the plan of the video

  • ★★ Ali says the third part of his revision Q&A series is about preparing for university exams, with tips that also suit content-heavy A-level and GCSE courses. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says active recall and spaced repetition are by far the biggest things you can do to make revision more efficient, so viewers should learn them before any other tip. — 00:00:29 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Before any revision, Ali says, scope your subject: build a broad outline of all the topics of the course and the important subtopics within each. — 00:00:58 · scoping the subject

00:01:17 — Tip 1: scope your subject

  • ★★ Ali says going through 70 lectures in order and trying to learn each lecture is not an efficient way to take information in; split the course into a few manageable topics instead. — 00:01:47
  • ★★ For each topic Ali asks for its broad skeleton: summarise it in one line, then in five lines, then on a single page, instead of learning the detail of single lectures as he used to. — 00:02:45 · scoping the subject
  • ★★★ With 70 lectures and little time, Ali suggests five minutes per lecture to skim it and jot down its topics and subheadings: 350 minutes, done in a single day. — 00:03:44 · scoping the subject

00:04:35 — Tip 2: essay plans are king

  • ★★★ If exams are essay-based, Ali advises basing revision on essay plans: take a topic's lectures and answer past or likely essay titles with them and the further reading. — 00:04:36
  • ★★ With enough essay plans, Ali says, one is quite likely to come up and you just reproduce it; otherwise you have still covered the lectures in a focused way. — 00:05:06
  • ★★ Ali says there is some evidence that structuring revision around actively answering a question improves understanding and retention of the topic. — 00:05:35
  • ★★ Ali says university is for wider learning, but with only a few weeks left before an exam you have to prepare for the exam itself. — 00:06:04

00:06:30 — Tip 3: past papers for maths and physics

  • ★★ For maths, physics or engineering, which he does not study, Ali would not use his spreadsheet of active recall questions but focus on problem sheets and past papers, as applied work tests the knowledge. (hedged) — 00:06:33 · active recall
  • ★★ Proofs in maths should be memorised rather than derived in the exam, Ali says: his brother, who did maths, made many flashcards of proofs, and Anki or a spreadsheet works for this. — 00:06:33 · Taimur Abdaal, Anki
  • ★★★ One of Ali's most important points for getting through university efficiently and without stress is to make use of students in the years above, who have been through the course. — 00:07:02

00:07:13 — Tip 4: make friends with older students

  • ★★ As a sixth-year student, Ali says he loves it when younger students ask him for advice, and at university the divide between year groups disappears. — 00:07:27
  • ★★ Ali advises finding students in the year above around campus, college or societies, asking them for their notes and advice, and making friends with older students. — 00:07:56
  • ★★★ Ali says the younger student has to make the effort to befriend older ones: an older student reaching out to a younger one feels a bit weird. — 00:08:54
  • ★★ In his first year an older friend advised Ali to befriend the years above, so he got to know older students in his college, the Pakistan Society and the Islamic Society; many are still his friends. — 00:09:23
  • ★★ Ali advises clinical medical students to befriend the junior doctors (FY1s and FY2s) on placement; about to be an FY1 himself, he would love to teach students but would feel weird making the first move. — 00:09:53
  • ★★ For exams, Ali says, befriending older students pays back a hundredfold: they share their notes, resources and PDFs and advise you on doing well. — 00:10:51

00:11:30 — Interim summary of the four tips

  • ★★ a guest: To revise a year's work in a month, scope the subject first, then decide what to drop and zoom in on the essential parts that get 80% of the marks. — 00:12:11 · scoping the subject

00:12:26 — Revising a year's work in a month; making a revision timetable

  • ★★ Asked how to make a good revision timetable, Ali says he does not like revision timetables. — 00:12:43
  • ★★ a guest: A friend of Ali who always makes revision timetables cuts the work into realistic daily chunks, adds social plans to budget the work, and leaves "spill days" as wiggle room for procrastination. — 00:13:13

00:13:36 — Coping with the workload at university and in medicine

  • ★★ For the university workload Ali says scope the subject, skip the detail that only matters for coming top of the year, and focus on the bread and butter that gets most of the marks. — 00:13:36 · scoping the subject
  • ★ Ali's brother, who did maths, gets annoyed by how much medics talk about how hard their degree is. — 00:13:36 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★★ Ali says medicine is not conceptually hard, only a lot of content that you memorise with spaced repetition and active recall; maths or engineering are arguably harder, so medics should drop the "medicine is so hard" narrative. — 00:14:05 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ a guest: Because medicine's facts could go on forever, one of Ali's friends says you must set a point to stop: cover the basics first, not the hundredth cause of atrial fibrillation, and know enough to be a competent, safe doctor. — 00:15:16

00:15:54 — Getting through recommended reading quickly

  • ★★ a guest: One of Ali's friends, who took politics, psychology and sociology in third year, got through reading lists by reading book reviews, which summarise the book and critique it. — 00:16:25
  • ★★★ For reading lists Ali advises reading with a goal instead of whole books: he structures revision around an essay title, keeps only what answers it and memorises good paragraphs in his flashcard deck. — 00:16:25
  • ★★ a guest: One of Ali's friends says review papers are the best reading, leading on to the primary research, and reverse-engineers essays: decide the point, search for literature that supports it and quote that paragraph. — 00:17:12
  • ★★ Ali says that in a psychology essay about IQ he would open by saying sex differences in intelligence have been studied for centuries and cite old papers he has not read, having only seen them quoted in another paper. — 00:17:53
  • ★★ Ali recommends citing papers from the sentences that quote them in other papers, without reading them, as a quick way through the reading. — 00:18:22
  • ★★ a guest: Asked how to make revision material for a lecture course, one of Ali's friends says it depends on your study style: understanding comes first, then active recall when you revise. — 00:18:22 · active recall

00:18:38 — Making revision material after lectures; pre-made notes

  • ★★★ When lecture notes are good, Ali makes no notes, only questions from them, which he answers and checks; when they are bad he looks for a review paper, a revision guide or someone's notes to avoid making his own. — 00:19:08 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali advises asking a friend like Paul, or students in the years above from your college or societies, for their notes: many are willing to share, so crowdsourcing saves making them. — 00:19:38 · Paul
  • ★★ Ali loves pre-made notes but not pre-made flashcards, because making a flashcard is what makes you think. — 00:20:03
  • ★★ a guest: One of Ali's friends says many people, such as their friend Marcus, learn by making their own notes, and should go on doing so. — 00:20:03
  • ★★ a guest: One of Ali's friends says making your own notes can be an important part of learning a topic you have not yet understood. — 00:20:03
  • ★★★ Ali says his advice that making notes is a waste of time is for people who make notes and are unhappy with their results: if notes get you top grades, carry on; active recall, though, suits everyone. — 00:20:33 · active recall

00:21:30 — Favourite stationery

  • ★★ Paul's favourite stationery is Pilot G207 (as heard) blue gel pens, which he has used for every exam. — 00:21:30 · Paul
  • ★★ Ali makes about 3% commission on his Amazon affiliate links: about £11 in the last year and about 43p that day. — 00:21:30
  • ★★ a guest: One of Ali's friends uses four-colour pens for active recall: write down what they remember, add what they missed in another colour, and on a later pass use yet another colour to see what they keep forgetting. — 00:22:12 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali's favourite stationery is his iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil: he has gone paperless and jokes that he would rather waste electricity than trees. — 00:22:12 · iPad Pro
  • ★ During Ramadan in exam season Ali breaks his fast with a date and a cold J2O from a six-pack he keeps in the fridge. (playful) — 00:22:41

00:22:54 — Revising while fasting in Ramadan

  • ★★ When Ramadan overlapped with exam term in the last two years, Ali slept after the dawn prayer and woke up late, which he calls a controversial cheat. — 00:23:28

00:24:01 — Take-home messages and sign-off outtakes

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · scoping the subject

Also: Anki · iPad Pro · Katherine · Paul · spaced repetition · Taimur Abdaal · University of Cambridge

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