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The KEY Study Techniques for Exam Success

2020-03-13 · Q&A video · Ali, Simon Clark · recording, 56:18 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Answering questions · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali and the physics YouTuber Simon Clark answer ten viewers' questions on studying: staying focused, how detailed active recall questions should be, revising maths and physics, revision timetables and spaced repetition diaries, memorisation, note-taking, carrying on after poor results, working through a tough time, and where to study.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Ali introduces Simon Clark and the ten questions; the other ten are on Nebula

  • ★★ Ali and Simon Clark answer 10 viewers' study questions in this YouTube video, one half of their study-tips discussion; another 10 questions on other study subjects are on Nebula. — 00:00:29 · Nebula

00:00:49 — How to stay focused while studying: distractions, the 45-minute limit, mindfulness, phones, music

  • ★★ Simon Clark, who says he gets distracted very easily, is most focused when he removes as many distractions as possible, such as a video playing on his second screen while he writes a script. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali finds about 45 minutes the upper limit of being naturally fully in the zone: filming study-with-me videos, he sometimes realises he has worked for 45 minutes without noticing. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Simon Clark says that to stay focused you have to accept you will not be focused the whole time, and use a mindfulness technique: the moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness of mindfulness meditation. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Simon Clark: When studying, Simon Clark says, recognise that you got distracted and that it is okay, a natural thing; do not shame yourself, but bring your attention back to what you are doing. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali says he used to struggle with focus and beat himself up whenever he lost it, but naturally stopped doing so. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Simon Clark says calling yourself an idiot each time you get distracted builds frustration and makes you associate studying with negative emotions, so return to the work neutrally. — 00:03:53
  • ★ Simon Clark has never used browser extensions that stop you going on sites such as Facebook. — 00:04:22 · Facebook
  • ★★ Simon Clark: Working for himself as a YouTuber, Simon Clark sometimes rolls with a distraction and turns it into a quick productive task, such as updating his finance spreadsheet or a thumbnail or writing an email, then returns. — 00:04:52
  • ★★ Ali does not use focus apps; one thing he does is turn his phone face down. — 00:05:21
  • ★★ Simon Clark turned off most phone notifications, including all Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ones, and is on Twitter far less since he removed its notifications. — 00:05:21 · Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Twitch
  • ★★ To focus, Ali puts his headphones on and plays his study-with-me playlist on Spotify of instrumental film music, such as Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. — 00:05:55 · Spotify
  • ★★ Simon Clark, a singer, finds music with words distracting because he sings along or listens to the words; he works to lo-fi beats, instrumental soundtracks and game soundtracks. — 00:06:24
  • ★★ Ali is working on a video called "Should you study with music", for which he has done a whole literature review. — 00:06:53
  • ★★★ Ali says the literature suggests music with words interferes with the phonological loop of working memory, instrumental music is all right, and silence is best, since we retain more when tested in the setting we learned in. (hedged) — 00:07:22
  • ★★ Ali cites studies in which people who learned a series of words underwater and were tested underwater did better than people who learned them on land. — 00:07:51
  • ★★ Ali knows listening to any music while studying is probably slightly suboptimal, but overall it massively increases his enjoyment and focus. — 00:07:51

  • ★★★ Simon Clark says the best study routine, like the best gym strategy, is the one you actually do: make studying unpleasant, such as eight hours a day in silence, and you will not want to do it. — 00:08:21

    “The best study routine is the one that you actually do.”

  • ★★ To make exam preparation more pleasant Ali uses soundtracks, libraries and nice coffee shops, and is happy to budget something like £20 a day on lattes. — 00:08:50

00:09:20 — How detailed active recall questions should be, and self-written questions in medicine and physics

  • ★★★ Ali says the detail of your own active recall questions should be tailored to the exam, to what you will feasibly need to know: first-year medical exams need more detail on a topic than finals. — 00:09:48 · active recall
  • ★★ Simon Clark argues that in physics you cannot self-write many active recall questions; you have to draw widely on existing ones. — 00:10:47 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali writes himself conceptual questions an exam would not ask, such as why you die after inhaling fresh water, to test his understanding of the concept. — 00:11:16
  • ★★ Simon Clark: For physics, Simon Clark points to Randall Munroe's book What If?, hypothetical situations such as draining all of Earth's water into the Mariana Trench. — 00:11:45

00:13:06 — Strategies for maths, physics and engineering: practice problems, past papers, the BMAT

  • ★★★ Simon Clark says you revise a technical subject only by doing practice problems, changing the numbers, the variable to calculate and the assumptions each time rather than repeating the same problem. — 00:13:31
  • ★★ Simon Clark: For school maths and physics Simon Clark based revision on past papers, because at school level you revise to pass that exam paper, not to master the knowledge. — 00:14:01
  • ★ Simon Clark: Having sat these exams as an adult on Twitch, Simon Clark notes that mark schemes accept only certain answers to quite general questions. — 00:14:30 · Twitch
  • ★ Ali took maths and physics at A level and chose English literature over further maths, which he regrets because he always liked maths. — 00:15:20
  • ★★ For A-level maths and physics Ali revised with CGP revision guides and past papers, and for maths needed only the many years of past papers. — 00:15:20
  • ★ Able to check his answers on his calculator in an A-level maths exam, Ali knew straight afterwards that he had scored 100% and got his offer. — 00:15:49
  • ★★ Simon Clark: If your exam board has few past papers, Simon Clark says, use other boards' and those used in Scotland and Wales: roughly the same, and they give a more rounded view of the subject. — 00:16:19
  • ★★ Ali sums up that revising a technical subject is all about doing the problems, and that doing them is active recall. — 00:16:48 · active recall
  • ★★ Simon Clark says what you revise by working through problems is the mental checklist for approaching one: what kind of problem it is, which equations you know, which variables you have. — 00:16:48
  • ★★ Coaching students for the BMAT, Ali tells them to write down the variables a question gives as they read it, such as speed, distance and unknown time, then ask which equation contains them and plug in the numbers. — 00:17:17 · BMAT
  • ★ Ali says medicine at Cambridge differed in having practical papers, more like analysing data from experiments. — 00:18:45 · University of Cambridge
  • ★ Simon Clark says physics at Oxford was about process rather than data or memorisation: given a set of concepts, you were expected to derive another. — 00:19:14 · University of Oxford

00:19:56 — Revision timetables and Simon's spaced repetition diary

  • ★★ Simon Clark: For a revision timetable Simon Clark first counts the hours realistically available up to the last exam, such as two or three on school evenings and about double at weekends. — 00:20:09
  • ★★★ Simon Clark then subtracts about 10% for leeway, sums the hours over the weeks and splits them between subjects by how confident he is in each: at GCSE he gave French more time than physics. — 00:20:38
  • ★★ Simon Clark breaks each subject's hours down by topics and modules and spaces them out so that everything is done before each exam day. — 00:21:07
  • ★★★ Simon Clark: At Oxford, where he did very well, Simon Clark kept a paper diary: he wrote what he had done each day and the same subject a day, a week and a month ahead, so each day gave him a list of topics to revise. — 00:22:06 · spaced repetition, University of Oxford
  • ★ Simon Clark colour-coded his diary to see at a glance how loaded each day would be. — 00:22:35
  • ★★ Ali says that had he used Simon Clark's diary as a doctor, writing "revise management of ectopic pregnancies" for the next day and a week ahead after each new case, over time he would know everything. (hypothetical) — 00:23:04
  • ★ Simon Clark thinks the ideal spacing interval after a month is so individual that it is hard to chart. — 00:23:50

00:24:38 — Memorisation: gamifying, active recall, the peg system and Ali's 50 memorised essay plans

  • ★★ Simon Clark's one-word tip for memorising is to gamify it, as flashcards partly do: test how many you can go through in a minute or how many you get right in a row. — 00:24:49
  • ★★ Ali says memorising comes down to spaced repetition and active recall, which he has been preaching for three years. — 00:25:36 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★ Simon Clark says that if he could go back and put two words into his brain at about 10, they would be "spaced repetition". — 00:25:36 · spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Simon Clark says it is far better to try to remember a fact than to read it: reading is passive, while trying to recall strengthens the brain's connections, like doing a workout rather than reading about one. — 00:26:05 · active recall
  • ★ Simon Clark memorises and delivers his YouTube scripts a paragraph or two at a time, as much as his working memory holds. — 00:26:35
  • ★★ Instead of one examinable fact per flashcard, as the theory says, Ali put tons of information on a card, because his topics were interconnected, and trusted repetition to move it into long-term memory. — 00:27:38
  • ★ Ali says sprinkling references such as "Hodgkin and Huxley 1942" into exam essays gives a few more marks and makes it look as if you have done external reading. — 00:28:08
  • ★★ Ali explains the peg system: each digit becomes a letter (such as one becoming L). — 00:28:08
  • ★★ With the peg system Ali memorised a list of about 50 references the night before a second-year exam, and forgot them the next day because he had not repeated them. — 00:28:37 · forgetting curve
  • ★ Simon Clark tells of a physiology student at his Oxford college who memorised two 2,000-word essays word for word for an exam, hoping one would come up; it did. — 00:29:06 · University of Oxford
  • ★★★ For his third-year exams Ali picked three modules, wrote down all their past essay titles, predicted a few more, planned a first-class essay for every one and memorised them all: about 50 essays. — 00:29:35
  • ★★ Ali memorised his essays' paragraphs as blocks of content with Anki. — 00:29:35 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali kept each essay's structure as a spider diagram; on set days he drew the diagrams out from memory and added the points he had forgotten in a different colour. — 00:31:06
  • ★★ Answering Simon Clark's point that he could regurgitate without understanding, Ali says making about 15 essay plans for comparative cognition meant he could take any question on it. — 00:31:35
  • ★★ Through his second and third terms Ali set himself the target of one essay plan a day. — 00:31:35

00:32:32 — Taking notes: handwriting versus typing, summarising, Cornell notes

  • ★★ Simon Clark: At university Simon Clark combined his lecture and textbook notes into one handwritten textbook for each course, finding writing the best way to take the information in. — 00:33:32
  • ★★ Simon Clark says writing slows his thinking so the material sinks in, where scanning takes two seconds; he likes handwriting and does not get the same benefit from a keyboard. — 00:34:01
  • ★★ Ali says the evidence shows handwriting gives longer retention than typing. — 00:34:22
  • ★★ Ali thinks taking notes in a lecture is fine because it keeps you awake; his issue is with summarising a textbook with the book open. — 00:34:22
  • ★★★ Ali says studies find summarising from a textbook about four times less effective than closing the book and trying to write it out from memory. — 00:34:52
  • ★★ In first year Ali and his friends revised by reading and highlighting, as at school, which proved completely unsustainable for medicine's volume; from second year they used revision guides and the year above's essays instead of notes. — 00:35:21
  • ★★ Simon Clark learns a derivation by doing it over and over, first with the book open and then closed. — 00:35:50
  • ★★ Ali describes Cornell note-taking: write questions about your notes beside them, and when reviewing, cover the notes and try to dredge up the information from the questions, since active recall is how we learn. — 00:37:04 · active recall
  • ★★ Simon Clark: In his third year at Oxford Simon Clark revised for about six same-sized modules at once, each examined by a 90-minute paper, all in the same week. (hedged) — 00:37:04 · University of Oxford

00:37:14 — Spaced repetition with multiple subjects: the paper diary and the retrospective revision timetable

  • ★★ Ali's near-identical method was his retrospective revision timetable: instead of projecting a subject a day, a week and a month forward, he marked in a Google Sheet the date he did each topic. — 00:38:16 · spaced repetition, Google Sheets
  • ★★★ Each day Ali aimed for five or six topics, chosen by the balance of their spacing intervals; he personally dislikes making a prospective plan because anything could happen. — 00:38:45
  • ★★ Ali colour-coded each revision date by how well he knew the topic, red if terrible and green if comfortable, and gave red topics priority. — 00:39:14
  • ★★ With multiple subjects, Ali says, the key is working out the priorities and where the biggest holes are. — 00:39:44
  • ★★ Simon Clark thinks Ali's retrospective system probably breaks down with many subjects, such as 20 modules to compare, while his own rigid diary copes with lots of subjects at once. (hedged) — 00:39:44
  • ★★ Simon Clark wishes he had started his diary in his first year: he started it only in his third and did incredibly well in those exams. — 00:40:13
  • ★★★ Simon Clark's consolation after poor results: by regression to the mean, you are likely to do better in your next exam. — 00:40:42

00:40:53 — Studying after poor results: regression to the mean and diversifying your identity

  • ★★ Simon Clark calls a poor result a fork: you can say "this is my life now" and wallow in it, or treat it as an opportunity to show how much better you can do. — 00:41:11
  • ★ Simon Clark recalls a Nobel Prize in economics linked to regression to the mean, with a fighter-pilot trainer, in Israel as he recalls, who stopped praising trainees because they then did worse. (hedged) — 00:41:40
  • ★★★ For dealing with failure, Ali likes the idea of diversifying your identity. — 00:42:10
  • ★★ At school Ali's whole identity was wrapped up in keeping his position: he came first in his school in the 11-plus, and his Year 7 report said "position on entry: 1". — 00:42:10
  • ★★ Applying to medicine in sixth form, Ali realised he needed extracurricular activities and took up others, such as close-up magic. — 00:42:57
  • ★★ Now a doctor, YouTuber and business owner, Ali says that if one of these goes wrong he has the others to fall back on. — 00:43:26 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Ali says that ideally our sense of identity would be internally generated, with no need for external validation, though realistically many of us still rely on some. — 00:43:26

  • ★★★ Simon Clark: At Oxford Simon Clark was nowhere near the best at physics, saxophone or public speaking, but was the best person who did all three; remember, he says, you are the best person in the world at being you. — 00:44:54 · University of Oxford

    “you are the best person in the world at being you”

  • ★★ Ali likens this to advice for startups and personal brands: Tim Ferriss has narrowed his brand until he is the only one doing what he does, and being the only one in your category is much easier than competing. — 00:45:52 · Tim Ferriss

  • ★★ Apart from his prize year Ali's results were middling, a 2:1 in first year, a first by a scrape in second, mediocre in clinical school, but with his other activities he never minded being in the top 30% or 40% rather than the top 10%. — 00:46:21

00:46:55 — Going through a tough time: wellbeing first, sleep, seasons of life

  • ★★★ Simon Clark: Going through a tough time, Simon Clark says, prioritise your mental health and wellbeing over one assignment, such as getting 100% rather than 90%. — 00:47:20 · Mental health

    “your well-being is worth more than a piece of paper”

  • ★★ Ali agrees completely that when going through personal things such as a breakup, they have to come first. — 00:47:49

  • ★★ Ali still struggles, getting home from work at about 10 p.m., to choose between cranking out a video and getting eight hours' sleep. — 00:48:18
  • ★ Simon Clark: During his PhD Simon Clark often stayed up until one, two or three in the morning to edit a video. — 00:48:47

  • ★★★ Ali passes on the biggest lesson a friend learned in his last ten years: almost nothing is worth losing sleep over. — 00:49:10

    “almost nothing is worth losing sleep over”

  • ★★ Simon Clark: To those who feel their work is too important to look after themselves, Simon Clark says ask how much it is really worth: pushing through only damages you in the long run. — 00:49:58

  • ★★ After work Ali battles between filming a video and going to the gym: he knows his health is far more important, but tells himself he can look after it later. — 00:50:27
  • ★★★ Ali finds it helpful to think it is okay to have different seasons of life that are off balance in different ways. — 00:50:56
  • ★★ When young and single, Ali says, work may take precedence over life a little more, hopefully setting you up for more balance later. (hedged) — 00:51:25
  • ★ Simon Clark calls work-life balance a time-integrated average: if your whole life's balance comes out close to zero, that is probably good. — 00:51:25

00:51:51 — Studying at home, in a library or a coffee shop

  • ★★ Simon Clark says whether to study at home, in a coffee shop or in a library depends on so many variables that it is entirely personal choice. — 00:51:54
  • ★★ Simon Clark: At Oxford Simon Clark studied certain subjects in certain libraries, atomic physics at the Sackler and general relativity at St Peter's, tying a place to a subject. — 00:52:19 · University of Oxford
  • ★★ Simon Clark: The best place to study, Simon Clark says, is wherever it will be a not unpleasant experience. — 00:52:48
  • ★★ Preparing for his second- and third-year exams, Ali did library hops: a different library each day, such as the medical school library, his college library, and the divinity and criminology faculties. — 00:53:18
  • ★★ On these library days Ali and a group of friends would have lunch at Selwyn College and go to Hot Numbers in the afternoon to study. — 00:53:18
  • ★ Simon Clark says WhatsApp had not been invented when he was at university; he was in no group chat until his PhD. — 00:53:47 · WhatsApp

00:53:58 — Nebula, the other half of the Q&A, and the CuriosityStream sponsor read

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · Simon Clark · spaced repetition

Also: People: Fred Rogers · Randall Munroe · Tim Ferriss

Works: 11-plus · BMAT · Pirates of the Caribbean · The Lord of the Rings · Tron: Legacy · What If?

Organizations: AQA · CGP · Facebook · Hot Numbers · Instagram · Nebula · OCR · Selwyn College · Twitch · Twitter · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford · Wikipedia

Concepts: Cornell note-taking · diversifying your identity · forgetting curve · learning styles · meditation · memory palace · Mental health · peg system · personal brand · Pomodoro technique · regression to the mean · spider diagram

Places: Scotland · Wales

Products: Anki · Cities: Skylines · Evernote · Forest · Google Sheets · Notion · SimCity · Slack · Spotify · The Sims · WhatsApp · World of Warcraft

Also centred on Simon Clark: Top 5 Revision & Study Tips for Students

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