How to Study for a Life without Exams

Of the many subjects I studied during college, the one at which I excelled most was test-taking. In a Freshman year psych class, I learned that a key to recalling knowledge on an exam is to simulate testing conditions while studying. From then on, I made it a practice to carry the same Orbitz Wintermint gum to my exams that I chewed while reading the textbook. When selecting what material to study I would attempt to outsmart my professors and TAs by predicting what questions they might ask. By the time I was a senior I had amassed dozens of tricks for making it seem like I had mastered the material. Today, however, if asked to recall what I’d learned studying for any of those exams I doubt all the gum in the world would give me a passing grade.

Outside of school, there are few occasions where you’ll be given an exam with an exact date and set of material. This doesn’t mean, though, that life won’t surprise you with tests. Some will be open-book, like when your boss emails you asking you to figure out your company’s customer acquisition cost or your investor sends you a term sheet to review. In these situations, consulting the right resource will get you far.

On other occasions though, such as when you receive a curveball question in a job interview or need to impress your prospect in a meeting, it will be critical that you are able to perform live, without the aid of the external sources. For this type of test, you’ll need to not only predict what subject matter you’ll be tested on but to ensure that the right information surfaces from your memory when the opportunity arises. In order to make sure that the knowledge that you deem important is accessible when you need it, you’ll want to rethink how you approach learning.

Benedict Carey’s How We Learn is a fantastic book filled with methods to increase retention and improve real-time recall capability. Here are five strategies adapted from the book’s findings to ensure that when life’s tests emerge you’ll be ready to ace them (if you’re interested in the research behind these findings I highly recommend you read the book):

Get Tested

On family vacations, when I was a kid, my mom and I would often pass the time by quizzing each other on state capitals. I don’t have an especially impressive memory and I can’t remember ever spending much time looking at a map of the US, but to this day, I can score 100% on any state capital quiz. During school, on the other hand, I spent most of my exam prep time cramming and re-formatting information into exhaustive study guides. Testing myself was always an afterthought. Testing, however, has been demonstrated to be the most important part of the learning process– with an optimal study time breakdown of 30% reading and reviewing to 70% testing.

If you’re finding this post useful, check out my monthly newsletter: “The Jungle Gym.” It’s full of ideas and resources to help you think clearer and work smarter.

Guess Wrong

When studying for exams I would often wait to test myself until I felt I had gained fluency in a given subject. I craved the confidence that came from nailing every answer, even if the quiz was self-administered. Recent research, however, has demonstrated that pre-testing, a strategy that tests a learner before he’s even been exposed to the material, can lead to better results and retention. This concept may seem strange– what is the point of testing yourself on material you’ve never seen? The act of guessing wrongly, it turns out, has been proven to increase a person’s likelihood of nailing that question or a related one on a later test. Learning that you’re wrong can also break your illusion of fluency in a given subject, and give you a more accurate idea of what you know. By testing yourself early on, you’re primed to recognize important concepts during the rest of your time learning.

Mix it Up

While it’s true that chewing the same brand of gum or studying to a certain Mozart concerto may increase your likelihood of recall when reintroduced to that same stimulus, it will not help you if you’re asked to perform in a completely different context. If your goal is to transfer what you’ve learned to a new and unknown environment you’ll want to have as many different external cues associated with the knowledge as possible. Rather than always studying at your desk try moving to a nearby coffee shop. If you tend to get most of your information through books try mixing in an online course. The more stimuli you can attach to the information the more chance you’ll be triggered by something external when the moment counts.

Avoid Repetition

Practice through repetition holds a storied place in American culture. We feel moved watching the commercial of the high-school basketball player alone in the gym, at the foul line, practicing his free throw over and over. But is repetition the best way to cement important skills for the long term? The results of several different experiments have shown that interleaving related but distinct material during study is much more effective than focused study. With repetition skills improve quickly but ultimately plateau. By contrast, varied practice creates a slower apparent rate of improvement in each single practice session but a greater accumulation of skill over time.

Forget about It

Often, I wish that after learning some critical skill or piece of information, I could move on to the next subject of interest with the peace of mind that what I spent so much effort learning would be cemented in my head and easily retrievable. Forgetting, however, is an inevitable part of learning, and an important one that allows for easy access to new information. Given the inevitability of forgetting, if you want to retain what you’ve studied it’s important to revisit it every so often. You may find it painful to test yourself and see how much you’ve forgotten but the very act of retrieving the information will make it that much more accessible in the future.

Unfortunately, I can’t offer you a framework to identify which specific pieces of knowledge will be important for the road ahead. What I can tell you, though, is that by using these strategies to learn new material you’ll stand your best chance of making the grade when the opportunity arises.

If you thought this post was useful, check out my monthly newsletter: “The Jungle Gym.” It’s full of ideas and resources to help you think clearer and work smarter.