Latest / The Mastery Project Podcast / Studied Hard but Still Failed the Exam? Here’s What to Change
Transcript
- Dr. T-Michael Dougherty, Ed.D.: If you've ever spent days or even hours studying for something, felt ready, and then struggled on the exam or froze on a practical, this episode is for you. Usually, the way you studied matters more than how long you studied. Today, I want to explain the difference between passive studying, like rereading your notes, and active studying, like testing yourself with your notes closed. We'll cover why rereading leaves you feeling less prepared than you think, when rereading is still useful, and what to change in your next study session to improve your chances of success on your next exam or practical. I'm Dr. T-Michael Dougherty and this is the Mastery Project Podcast. Where we explore the science of learning, leadership, and human performance in the pursuit of mastery. No matter what you're studying, if your goal is mastery of the content, or at the very least, retention, you should be spending most of your time forcing yourself to produce the information from your brain instead of just looking at it over and over again. That's what I mean by active studying. You answer practice questions with your notes closed. You write out the steps of a procedure from memory, and then you check what you missed. You explain a concept to a classmate in as much detail as you can recall. If you don't have a classmate to study with, you can use a mirror, or better yet, you can record yourself on video, upload it to an AI model, and have it critique your performance and provide you with feedback for another attempt. If you're studying or trying to learn a skill, describe each detail of the process to someone as you perform it. Passive studying is the other kind, and it usually feels really easy and comfortable. which is why students often revert to it, particularly when the content becomes more challenging. So passive review is essentially rereading your notes, highlighting your textbook and looking back over lecture slides, or even read just re-watching a recorded lecture without stopping to test yourself. The main problem with passive review is that it makes you feel more prepared than you really are. When you reread a page for the third time, the material starts to look familiar to you and that familiarity often feels like that you know it. But recognizing something on a page you're looking at is much easier than pulling it out of your own memory when nothing is in front of you to prompt you. And on a written exam, you're not going to have your notes there to prompt you. On a lab practical, you're going to have an instructor watching you perform a skill and they may stop and ask you why you placed your hand where you did, or they may ask you what you do if this or that happened to judge your response. And if all you did to prepare was read over your notes, or flip cards, you may not realize what you don't know until you're in the exam or in front of your instructor. And by then, you can't fix it. That's why active studying helps you. It shows you your gaps or your weaknesses while you still have time to do something about them. Say you close your notes and try to list four items from a list, but you can only remember two of them. You've learned something useful from that. That topic needs more work. Then you can go back Check the list and try again later without looking after you've reviewed the material one more time. That cycle of trying, checking, and trying again is that part that builds your ability to recall information when you need it. Active studying also matches what most exams and jobs actually ask of you. Many exam questions don't ask you to just repeat a definition. They describe a situation and ask what you do, what would happen next in a process or a series of steps. Or which answer would fit best in a scenario. Licensing and certification exams in most fields are written this the same way. You can't answer those types of questions by just recognizing a term that you might have seen before. You have to apply what you know to the situation in front of you. The same thing happens outside the classroom. In an internship or a lab or a job, someone will expect you to explain your reasoning and adjust when things don't go as you've planned them. Practice questions, working through examples, and explaining material to someone out loud, I'll give you practice doing exactly that. So here are some specific things that you can do. When you finish a when you finish a lecture, close your notes and write down everything that you can remember. Then compare what you've written down to your notes and mark what you've omitted. If you use flashcards, say the answer out loud before you flip your card. Otherwise, I wouldn't even bother with them. Do practice questions. Try to answer them first without prompting though, and for everyone that you get wrong, figure out why the correct answer is the correct answer. And if you can't find enough practice questions for a course, ask your instructor whether they have any or they can point you to some. Passive review still has a place in learning. Reading the chapter before class is reasonable when you're seeing the material for the first time because you can't test yourself on something that you've never learned. Rereading an explanation makes sense after you've missed a practice question and you need to understand the correct answer. Watching a demonstration video of a skill being performed before you practice it can help you see the sequence of steps. And looking over your notes can be really useful when you're too tired late at night. To do anything more challenging than just that. The problem comes when passive review becomes your whole study plan, your whole approach. Active studying is harder and it's gonna feel more uncomfortable because you'll see your mistakes more often. But that's the whole point of it. It also doesn't guarantee a passing grade and it can't make up for a schedule with no time to study, or a course where the expectations were never explained clearly to you. So if either of those is your problem, You need to talk to your instructor or your advisor about it. But if you're putting in hours and your scores are not reflecting the effort that you're putting in, look at how you spend those hours. How much of that time were you testing yourself? And how much were you just rereading the content? So spend most of your study time pulling information out of your own memory and checking it. And save rereading for learning something new or understanding a question that you might have missed. This week, Take one topic you'd normally reread and test yourself on it with your notes closed instead. Remember, if it feels difficult or awkward at first, that's the whole point. And it means that you're learning. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Mastery Project Podcast. Before you go, type a comment below and let me know how you plan to use active study techniques before your next exam.