Skip to content

How I Ranked 1st at Cambridge University - 20 Study Tips

2022-02-23 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 22:10 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

Ali gives his study tips in five parts (target, revision, technique, friends, balance): scope the subject, target weaknesses with a retrospective revision timetable, skip note-taking, understand first and then memorise with active recall, spacing and interleaving, do mock exams, add flair, study and test each other with friends, keep a workspace, schedule time to unwind and enjoy the journey.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Intro: study tips in five parts, target, revision, technique, friends and balance

  • ★ Ali groups his study tips into five parts: target, revision, technique, friends and balance. — 00:00:00

00:00:26 — Scope the subject

  • ★★★ Ali's first study tip is to scope the subject: for every exam subject, make a tree diagram of everything to learn, building the trunk and branches before worrying about the details. — 00:00:29 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ Once the subject is scoped, Ali colour-codes every topic red, amber or green, so he sees at a glance the red zones to focus his revision on. — 00:00:58 · scoping the subject

00:01:27 — Focus on your weaknesses

  • ★★★ Ali's second tip is to focus on your weaknesses: students tend to revise what they are good at, such as the first chapters of every book, and colour-coding topics helps target weak spots. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Ali says focusing on weaknesses is probably bad advice in real life, where we get ahead through our strengths, but in school and university exams a great mark in one subject does not make up for bad marks in another. (hedged) — 00:01:56

00:02:25 — Use a retrospective revision timetable

  • ★★★ Ali's third tip is a retrospective revision timetable, because a prospective revision timetable planned in advance is a bit of a waste of time and, in his experience, never gets followed once real life gets in the way. — 00:02:55 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali has used a retrospective revision timetable for his exams since his second year of medical school: instead of planning in advance, he plans each day's revision on the day, by his weakest topics. — 00:02:55 · spaced repetition

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip, which he calls a controversial take, is that note-taking is broadly a waste of time. — 00:03:24

    “note-taking is broadly a waste of time”

00:03:47 — Notetaking is a waste of time

  • ★★ Ali says there is a decent amount of evidence that taking notes and summarising with the book open is not a very effective way to learn, because it is passive and easy. — 00:03:53 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Memory and connections between topics form through effort, Ali says: the harder learning seems, the more likely the brain is to form connections and the better we know the topic. — 00:04:22
  • ★★ Taking notes makes sense, Ali says, where there is no easily accessible revision guide, as in English literature needing your own reading of Madame Bovary; medicine and science students already have plenty of revision guides. — 00:04:52
  • ★★★ Ali's next tip is to understand first and memorise second; trying to memorise as you go along is a mistake he made a lot as a student. — 00:05:21

00:05:29 — Focus on understanding, then memorise with active recall, spaced repetition and interleaving

  • ★★ Ali defines understanding as being able to explain a topic to a five-year-old, citing a line he says is allegedly Einstein's and the Feynman technique, named after Richard Feynman. — 00:05:50
  • ★★ Ali advises explaining each topic in your head to a five-year-old or a friend; where you cannot answer their questions, your understanding ends, so fill that gap from a textbook, the internet, Wikipedia or YouTube. — 00:06:19
  • ★★★ Ali calls active recall, testing yourself, by far the number one technique in all of effective studying, a subject of many of his videos over five years. — 00:06:49 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali cites the authors of Make It Stick, a book on the science of effective learning, who say that being unhappy with your grades in any test or exam just means you are not testing yourself enough. — 00:07:18 · active recall
  • ★★ With bad marks, Ali advises testing yourself more often, until it feels hard, and says he basically guarantees it will improve your score. — 00:07:47 · active recall
  • ★★ Memory for anything learned decays exponentially, Ali says: this is the forgetting curve, discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1800s. — 00:07:47 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali calls photographic memory a complete myth: there is no evidence that anyone in the world has one. — 00:08:16
  • ★★ Spaced repetition in Ali's example: test yourself at the end of the first session, again the next day, then four days, a week and three weeks later, looking at your notes for anything you got wrong. — 00:08:46 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★★ Studying 15 minutes a day is way better than two hours at the end of the week, Ali says, thanks to the spaced repetition effect and to memories consolidating during sleep. — 00:09:15 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali reports studies in which students given maths problems interleaved across topics, rather than in blocks, perform way better; no one quite knows why. — 00:09:44
  • ★★ Ali advises interleaving: rather than three hours of renal physiology, an hour of it followed by heart physiology, then anatomy, then back to renal physiology. (hedged) — 00:10:13

00:10:39 — Do lots of mock exams

  • ★★★ Ali's starting point for exam technique: the exam is not a test of knowledge but a test of exam performance. — 00:10:42

    “the exam is actually not a test of knowledge. It's a test of exam performance.”

  • ★★ Even in medical school, Ali says, what written exams test is generally not what makes you a better doctor. — 00:11:12

  • ★★★ Ali's technique tip is to do lots of mock exams: past papers are often the most high-yield thing you can do, as active recall and as practice for what examiners ask. — 00:11:12 · active recall
  • ★★ The medical school exams Ali did best in were those for which he had done the most mock papers, so he could get inside the examiners' heads and predict the questions. — 00:11:41
  • ★★ To commenters who say students should study for the sake of knowledge, Ali agrees that in an ideal world he would, but he also has to pass an exam. — 00:11:41
  • ★★★ For essay and long-answer exams Ali advises intentional flair: the more flair, the more interesting the answer is to the examiner. — 00:12:10
  • ★★ Ali spent a year supervising medical physiology at Cambridge University, reading dozens of essays; the best had some flair, from nice handwriting to pretty diagrams. — 00:12:10 · University of Cambridge

00:12:14 — Use intentional flair

  • ★★ Ali tells students a secret: a lot of examiners don't actually read the whole essay. — 00:12:39
  • ★★ Front-loading flair and making essays look pretty creates a halo effect with examiners and a better mark, Ali says: it is about packaging and presentation, not only content. — 00:13:38
  • ★★ Where coursework counts towards the final grade, Ali advises banking as many points as possible with it, so less rests on the final exam. — 00:13:38

00:13:51 — Bank points with coursework

  • ★★★ Ali advises studying with friends, though most people fear distraction: find a group you vibe with, all motivated for the exams, not necessarily in the same subject. — 00:14:07

00:14:19 — Study with friends

  • ★★ Ali and friends from different subjects studied together in the same library with the Pomodoro technique, 25 minutes of study and a five-minute break, and set up the WhatsApp group the Pomodoro Society, still going today. — 00:14:36 · Pomodoro technique, WhatsApp
  • ★★ Studying with friends may cost a little productivity, Ali says, but it made him much more motivated and made university much more fun. — 00:14:36

00:15:10 — Test each other

  • ★★★ Rather than asking a friend who knows everything, such as their friend Paul, to explain a topic like the thyroid, Ali advises asking the friend to test you on it and then filling in the gaps. — 00:15:35 · Paul

00:16:02 — Read your friends' essays

  • ★★ At university Ali and his medic friends (Katherine, Jake, Molly, Paul, Callum and others) split the exam essays in a shared Google Drive: each wrote three and got access to about 30 from the other ten medics of their college. — 00:16:04 · Google Drive, Katherine, Molly Hunt, Paul
  • ★★ Ali does not endorse regurgitating a friend's essay word for word: use friends' notes, share resources and add your own flair to make the work your own. — 00:16:51
  • ★★★ Ali advises having a workspace; he liked libraries: in his first year of medical school he failed to work in his room, distracted by his computer, music and the bed next door, and from his second year he went to the library every morning after breakfast. — 00:16:51

00:17:02 — Have a workspace

  • ★★ Writing his book about productivity, Ali makes the most progress with a routine: wake up, go to the gym, then sit down for three hours to write. — 00:17:20 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali calls the glamorisation of overwork at university and medical school, with no time to sleep and all-nighters, generally bad. — 00:17:49

00:18:04 — Have time to unwind

  • ★★★ Ali finds it useful to schedule time to unwind into his calendar, because when work feels like a game it is easy to skip the gym or sport. — 00:18:19
  • ★★ Ali first took up squash in the exam season of his second year, playing about an hour a day with friends as an exam break. — 00:18:48
  • ★★ Squash as a semi-competitive stress reliever made Ali more motivated to study and tired enough at night to sleep well, when memories are consolidated. — 00:18:48

00:19:17 — Focus on enjoying the journey

  • ★★★ Ali's advice to students is to enjoy the journey rather than fixate on the destination: as a student it is easy to defer your happiness until after the exams, the degree or a job. — 00:19:17 · journey before destination
  • ★★ To medical students who say they don't enjoy medical school but it will be worth it once they are doctors, Ali says this is a dangerous way to live: medical school is more fun than being a doctor. — 00:19:17
  • ★★ Being a student is supposed to be the best time of your life, Ali says: never again will you have so much spare time and so many friends around you. — 00:19:46
  • ★★ Ali tries to enjoy each day on its own merit rather than fixating on the next rung of the ladder and "I will be happy when". — 00:19:46

00:20:30 — Brilliant sponsor read and sign-off pointing to the essay memorisation framework video

  • ★ Applying to medical school, Ali was torn between medicine and computer science; he chose medicine, which he calls a great decision. — 00:21:14
  • ★★ Ali used his essay memorisation framework to win the prize for the best exam performance in one of his years of medical school. — 00:21:43

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · spaced repetition

Also: People: Albert Einstein · Callum · Hermann Ebbinghaus · Jake (friend, mentioned from 2017) · Katherine · Molly Hunt · Paul · Richard Feynman

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Game of Thrones · Madame Bovary · Make It Stick

Organizations: Brilliant · Pomodoro Society · University of Cambridge

Concepts: Essay Memorisation Framework · Feynman technique · forgetting curve · halo effect · interleaving · journey before destination · Pomodoro technique · scoping the subject

Products: Google Drive · WhatsApp

Replies to

← Previous: 7 Side Hustles You Can Start This Year · Next → How to Grow on YouTube - Live Stream with Ali Abdaal