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How I ranked 1st at Cambridge University - The Essay Memorisation Framework

2019-04-09 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 17:52 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Aimed at students, His medical past

Junior doctor Ali sets out the essay memorisation framework he credits for winning the best-exam-performance prize in his third-year psychology exams at Cambridge: a creation stage of first-class essay plans for every likely title, researched from Google first, and a memorisation stage using Anki content blocks, spider diagrams drawn from memory and his retrospective revision timetable; he admits the prize was joint and he technically came second.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Introduction: the essay memorisation framework and the prize in third year

  • ★★★ In his third year at Cambridge, studying psychology, Ali won the prize for best exam performance in his year group, which he attributes almost entirely to his essay memorisation framework. — 00:00:00 · University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali says his essay memorisation framework should work for most essay-based subjects. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Ali's essay memorisation framework has two stages: in the creation stage you make first-class essay plans for every conceivable exam title; in the memorisation stage you commit them all to memory with active recall, spaced repetition, spider diagrams and flashcards. — 00:00:29 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ With enough memorised essay plans, Ali says, many predicted titles come up and can be written straight from memory, and for titles not memorised the content blocks in your head let you write a first-class essay from scratch. — 00:00:29

00:00:34 — General overview: the creation stage and the memorisation stage

00:01:21 — The creation stage: deciding what essays to plan

  • ★★★ To choose which essays to plan, Ali advises scoping the subject with titles that cover the whole syllabus: start with past papers, then, knowing the subject better, put yourself in the examiners' shoes and think up titles not yet asked. — 00:01:52 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ Without past papers, Ali suggests imagining the examiner's titles from the start or asking your teacher or lecturer what essays might come up in the exam. — 00:02:22
  • ★★ In his third year Ali made only about five essay plans in the first term, calling himself a slacker, about 10 in the second term and about 35 in the Easter holidays. — 00:02:22

00:02:30 — How to plan the essays: one day per plan, Google first, a research document

  • ★★★ Ali researched each essay question with Google first, ignoring the lecture notes and recommended reading, reading the review papers it led to and following their references; only after making the plan did he look at the lecture notes and reading, which he hopes made his material more original. — 00:03:06 · Google
  • ★★ For each essay topic Ali first made a research document, copying and pasting into it every relevant bit of every paper he could find, before planning the essay. — 00:03:35
  • ★★ Ali gave himself one day to research and plan each essay because of Parkinson's law: work expands to fill the time allocated to it. — 00:04:56
  • ★★★ In Ali's opinion three things count in a good essay plan: structure, actually answering the question, and a bit of flair; he thinks the introduction is the most important part of the essay. — 00:04:56

00:04:57 — How to make the essay plan really good: structure, answering the question and flair in the introduction

  • ★★ The introduction matters most, Ali says, because it signals structure, an answer and flair to an examiner who is probably bored after reading hundreds of scripts, so it should be really strong. — 00:05:25
  • ★★ Ali lays out an essay's main parts in the introduction as numbered points rather than a plain list, because numbering makes the good structure really obvious to the examiner. — 00:06:41
  • ★★ In his introduction Ali says exactly what his answer to the question is, stating what the essay will argue instead of skirting around it. — 00:06:41
  • ★★ Ali adds flair to an introduction with historical context taken from a textbook or review paper and rephrased in his notes; since the plan is not used word for word in the exam, he says it is absolutely not plagiarism. — 00:07:11
  • ★ Ali does not think he is very good at writing essays, but thinks he is good at using Google, copying material into a research Word document, turning it into legit-sounding prose and memorising it systematically. — 00:07:40 · Google
  • ★★ Ali asks viewers who want to know how he writes an essay to say so in the comments, and says he may try to make a video on it if he can break the process down further. (hedged) — 00:07:40
  • ★★ The memorisation stage of Ali's essay memorisation framework uses three techniques: Anki flashcards, spider diagrams and a retrospective revision timetable. — 00:08:09 · Anki, spaced repetition

00:08:10 — The memorisation stage: Anki flashcards to memorise content blocks

  • ★★★ Ali used Anki flashcards to memorise every paragraph of every essay plan, which he says may seem overkill but worked for him. — 00:08:36 · Anki
  • ★★ Going through his flashcards every day of the exam term with Anki's spaced repetition algorithm, Ali knew anything in his Anki deck would get into his memory with little effort. — 00:09:05 · Anki, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Each of Ali's Anki cards is a block of content, such as a paper and what it shows, that slots into a planned essay; when an unplanned essay comes up, he still knows the relevant papers and can use them in new essays written in the exam. — 00:09:34 · Anki

00:09:50 — Spider diagrams to memorise entire essays

  • ★★ Knowing experiments from flashcards helps little unless they are tied to their essays, Ali says; so from 20 April he made a one-page spider diagram of every single essay. — 00:10:04 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali writes on each spider diagram only the keywords of content blocks held in Anki, such as "G plus C, 1966", so that he knows exactly what each refers to. — 00:10:59 · Anki
  • ★★★ Every day Ali drew spider diagrams of his essays from memory, looked up any bits he did not know or was shaky on in his master diagram, essay plan or Anki, and worked on them: a systematic use of active recall. — 00:11:58 · active recall, Anki
  • ★ On 8 May, about a week before his exams, Ali drew out his plans for about 15 different essays. — 00:12:27

00:12:49 — The retrospective revision timetable for active recall and spaced repetition

  • ★★ In his retrospective revision timetable Ali marked the date each time he actively recalled an essay plan and colour-coded it red, yellow or green by how well he knew it. — 00:13:35 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★★ With his essay memorisation framework Ali memorised about 45 to 50 essay plans for his third-year psychology exams, using active recall, spaced repetition, flashcards and spider diagrams. — 00:14:04 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Of the 12 essays Ali had to write in his third-year exams, he thinks about eight, two thirds, were among the 50 he had already planned and could write from memory. (hedged) — 00:14:04

00:14:10 — Wrapping up: the exam, the joint prize and his later years of study

  • ★★ About four of Ali's exam essays were new titles he had not predicted, but he knew the subjects so well from memorising his essays that he built each from scratch in about 10 minutes. — 00:14:42
  • ★★★ Ali reveals that his third-year prize for best exam performance was actually a joint award with another student, who beat him by a few decimals of a percentage point, so he technically came second. — 00:15:11
  • ★★ Ali wishes he had revised this systematically in later years: after peaking in third year he wanted to do other things and reverted to what he calls inefficient habits, rereading and highlighting, in his fourth, fifth and sixth years. — 00:15:40
  • ★★ In his later years at medical school Ali's retrospective revision timetable let him get reasonable marks efficiently while running a business and a YouTube channel, which he doubts he could have done otherwise. — 00:16:10 · spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Efficient study techniques are useful, Ali says, because you can either put in loads of time and get really good marks or have time to do other things on the side. — 00:16:10

00:16:39 — Sign-off: questions in the comments and on his website

  • ★★ Ali says he will put a link in the description to a page on his website with the commonly asked questions about his essay memorisation framework and fuller answers. — 00:16:39 · aliabdaal.com

00:17:08 — Plugs: Instagram, the Not Overthinking podcast, subscribing

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Mentioned

Central: active recall · Anki · Essay Memorisation Framework · spaced repetition · spider diagram

Also: aliabdaal.com · Cambridge · Google · Microsoft Word · Parkinson's law · scoping the subject

Only in the description or credits: Intercalated degree · University of Cambridge

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