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Top 5 Revision & Study Tips for Students

2020-02-13 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Simon Clark · recording, 13:31 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Productivity and time, Mindset, motivation and happiness, YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, Sponsor segment present

Ali and his friend Simon Clark, a physics YouTuber, give five revision tips: Simon's spaced repetition diary, constraining study time against Parkinson's law, making studying pleasant, building downtime into a revision plan, and not comparing your behind the scenes with someone else's highlight reel.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Introducing Simon Clark and their study-tips discussions on Nebula; sponsor mention

  • ★ Simon Clark, another YouTuber, studied physics at Oxford University and then did a PhD at Exeter University. — 00:00:00 · University of Oxford
  • ★★ Ali and Simon Clark spent three hours discussing viewers' revision and study questions sent in via Instagram; Ali will upload the discussions to YouTube over the next few weeks. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali says Nebula is a streaming service that he and Simon Clark are both helping to build. — 00:00:29 · Nebula
  • ★★★ Simon Clark says that if he could tell his ten-year-old self two words, they would be "spaced repetition"; he cannot stress enough how important the technique is. — 00:00:29 · spaced repetition

00:00:43 — Tip 1: the spaced repetition diary and Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve

  • ★★ Ali explains that in the 1800s Ebbinghaus found memory of anything learned decays exponentially, and that revising a topic the next day, then a week later, makes it take longer to forget each time. — 00:00:58 · forgetting curve
  • ★★ Simon Clark says his third-year exams at Oxford were the best academic performance of his career, which he puts down to his spaced repetition diary. — 00:01:27 · University of Oxford, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Simon Clark's spaced repetition diary: after studying a subtopic, he wrote it into a paper diary again a day, a week and a month ahead, so each day of revision came with a ready-made list of topics to go back to. — 00:01:56 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Simon Clark would bet a lot that he would have done better at university with more extracurricular activities and less time for work: his biggest problem was letting work expand to fill the whole day. — 00:02:57

00:03:04 — Tip 2: better results in less time, Parkinson's law and a daily tennis deadline

  • ★★ Simon Clark imagines a tennis session every day at four o'clock, leaving four hours after lectures for work: constraining the work that way, he thinks, would have made him much more focused. — 00:03:26
  • ★★ Ali sees Parkinson's law, that work expands to fill the time allocated to it, almost every day: with one video to film in a day he procrastinates until 9 p.m., but with five videos at an hour each he gets most done and has more fun. — 00:03:56
  • ★★ Simon Clark says you have to put yourself under some pressure to do good work: dedicate set hours to definitely not working and treat them as your deadline; both your work and your mental health are better for it. — 00:04:25 · Mental health
  • ★★ Ali makes studying more pleasant so that he is more likely to do it: for exams he studies in libraries and coffee shops and lets himself buy, say, five lattes a day without guilt. — 00:04:54
  • ★★ Ali, agreeing with Simon Clark, says the evidence is probably that studying with music is suboptimal, a slight hit on efficiency. (hedged) — 00:04:54

00:04:56 — Tip 3: make studying great again with coffee shops, lattes and film soundtracks

  • ★★ Ali is more than happy to take the efficiency hit of studying with music, because Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter soundtracks make him feel like a legend while he studies. — 00:05:33 · Harry Potter (book series)

  • ★★ Ali sums up how to approach studying: "not maximize fun, minimize pain". — 00:05:33

    “not maximize fun, minimize pain”

00:05:45 — Plug for the full study discussions on Nebula and the sponsor

  • ★★★ Simon Clark says possibly his single largest academic mistake was not taking better care of himself, the part of a study plan that gets overlooked. (hedged) — 00:06:31

00:06:36 — Tip 4: take care of yourself, with downtime, board-game evenings and the exam as your Olympics

  • ★★★ Simon Clark says a revision plan must be realistic and include time off, such as a couple of hours a week, because the body that carries the brain breaks down without it, and so will the brain. — 00:07:01
  • ★★ Simon Clark says the free time you need is highly individual: do not copy other people's, but take as much as keeps your brain functioning at optimum efficiency. — 00:07:34
  • ★★ Preparing for their final-year medical school exams, Ali and his friends studied alone or in a group by day, and most evenings got together for a few hours, usually in his room. — 00:07:34
  • ★ On those evenings Ali and his friends ordered pizza or sushi and played board games such as Avalon and Articulate, which he calls absolutely incredible. — 00:08:03
  • ★★ Ali says the system made final-year revision really fun: he and his friends worked efficiently together as a team and also had chill downtime to relax. — 00:08:03
  • ★★ Simon Clark compares exam preparation with an Olympian's: no one would tell an Olympian to train every waking hour before the Olympics, and your coming exam is your Olympics. — 00:08:33

00:09:09 — Tip 5: don't compare your behind the scenes to someone else's highlight reel

  • ★★ Simon Clark passes on advice from one of his tutors at Oxford: do not be distracted by people who look as if they do everything easily; they do spend long hours in the library, but show you only a highlight reel. — 00:09:17 · University of Oxford

  • ★★★ Simon Clark's rule: don't compare your real-time experience with someone's edited highlights, just as at the gym you don't compare your middle with somebody's end or beginning. — 00:09:46

    “don't compare your real time experience to someone's edited highlights.”

  • ★★ Ali tells how a student in his friend Paul's physiology class, asked how he knew the answer to a niche question, said he was far behind on the lectures and had happened to read that one fact that morning. — 00:10:19 · Paul

  • ★★★ Ali says it is really important to recognise that our friends, colleagues and everyone else are just winging it as much as we are. — 00:10:48
  • ★★ Ali says Simon Clark's YouTube channel, which he discovered a few years before starting out on YouTube, is one of the fundamental inspirations for his own. — 00:10:48

00:10:55 — Simon Clark's channel as an inspiration for Ali's own

  • ★★ Before seeing Simon Clark's channel, Ali thought doing well on YouTube took a loud, effusive, over-the-top personality; Simon's thoughtful, valuable content was a big inspiration for him to start his channel. — 00:11:18

00:11:40 — Nebula, the CuriosityStream sponsor read and sign-off

  • ★ Ali plans to cut his three hours of study-tip discussions with Simon Clark into individual YouTube videos over time, because that is how the platform works and what is good for the YouTube algorithm. — 00:11:54

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Simon Clark · spaced repetition

Also: People: Hermann Ebbinghaus · Paul

Works: Harry Potter (book series) · The Lord of the Rings

Organizations: Nebula · University of Exeter · University of Oxford

Concepts: forgetting curve · Mental health · Parkinson's law

Products: Articulate · Avalon

Also centred on Simon Clark: The KEY Study Techniques for Exam Success

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