I have a question for you.
If you were to take your final exams tomorrow, how would you score?
If you’re like me, you’ve been putting off studying for finals for, well, as loooooong as possible. Which usually means that our scores would not exactly be stellar. Or really any good at all.
And as the saying goes: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.” (Jessie Potter)
So, let’s kick procrastination to the curb, shall we? And there is no better time to start than today.
So here are 3 steps to get the ball rolling and help take the stress out of studying for finals.
Collect all of your notes from throughout the term.
Gather everything together, including your lecture notes from all of your classes, modules, study guides, Power Points, and anything else your professors give you. Look through your backpack, your car, your kitchen table, and anywhere else your nursing school notes might be hiding. Seriously, those notes can be slippery little suckers. Check your kiddos backpacks and that stack of mail too, just to be safe.
Organize them all into packets.
Go through each piece of paper and organize them by class. So if you have 3 nursing school classes, you should have 3 piles.
Then, after you’ve sorted all of your lecture materials by class, go back through each stack and organize them by week (or by topic if you prefer). After you’re done with this process, you should have multiple stacks for each class, each stack representing one week (or one topic) of the term.
Study a little bit at a time.
How here’s where most of your time will be spent: studying.
Go through each individual stack one by one and study it.
As you sift through it, highlight ONLY the information you don’t know or can’t remember.
Seriously, skip all of the rest. Trust yourself, you know it already, so don’t bother highlighting it and re-studying it again. Do this for each stack of notes you have for each class.
Then, after you’ve highlighted all of the information you haven’t fully learned, go back through each stack and only study your highlighted notes. This process is critical for saving time while studying for finals, along with allowing you to be more efficient.
Instead of focusing your study time on the things you already know, you will solely be studying the things you don’t yet know. Plus, it cuts down the stuff you have to study to a fraction of what it would have been.
Not to sound like a broken record or anything, but I’m going to say it again: Trust yourself! You’ve studied your butt off this term, and you know more than you think you do. So focus your precious study time on brushing up on the things you don’t know yet.
Seriously, when you break your studying down into small stacks or chunks of content at a time, it is MUCH less daunting. You can actually get through it without going totally bonkers.
Now, for the most important part: set aside a little bit of time every day to study from now (yes, now) until your final exams. That LAST thing you want to do is cram for a major final. That will just add more unnessesary stress to your life. So plan to start this process at least a week in advance (but preferably 2)…so, like, NOW! 🙂
You’ve got this!
Ready…Set…GO!
