Mastering your exam preparation
Why some students are better at cracking CA than others?
SUMMARY OF TODAY’S NEWSLETTER:
Key ideas:
Begin with the end in mind - your goal is to be ready on exam day with quick access to what you have learned.
Divide preparation time into three periods: Preparation phase, Recall week, Recall day.
Always create your unified texts during preparation.
Scrap the outdated term of revision. Use recall. The real objective is not to do an ‘act of revision’, the objective is to develop the ‘ability to recall’.
‘Time to recall’ is inversely proportional to the number of times you performed ‘recalls’.
You do not prepare for exams, you prepare for the day before exams i.e. the recall day.
All of us prepare for exams but only a few shine more than the others. Ever wondered why? The answer lies in one word: memory. I have been teaching CA students since 2009 and I have dealt with a massive variety of 6000+ students across Pakistan and globally. If you ask me, what's the one big difference between first attempters and perpetual failures, it is the skill to fetch the best out of your memory. In this article, I am going to speak about the big ideas you must know about mastering your memory, particularly in the context of descriptive courses like Auditing, Business Management, Law, etc.
Beginning with the end in mind – your goal is to be ready in the exam hall with the ability to access what you have learned.
Now imagine you are preparing to write professional exams for three papers, so if today is 31st Dec and you have exams in 1st week of June. Then I would divide all this time into three phases.
1. Preparation time: This requires most of your time – it comprises exploring the primary text, reading articles, making notes, remembering, and revisiting your notes along with making intricate connections and clarifying your concepts. The duration for this period will commence today and close a week/10 days before the exams.
A key deliverable of this phase is a unified text.
We know for a fact that all that you will study from diverse resources will not be manageable unless you conflate them all into a unified place or a text and these are generally the notes that you have prepared from a multitude of resources. Due to time scarcity, you might choose to use your ICAP textbook or Bare Acts for some areas, and that's fine. However, a large portion of your course coverage should converge to a unified text or your notes.
2. Recall week: This takes a week or 10 days, maybe. The length hinges on the number of courses you’ve subscribed for and how thoroughly prepared you have proceeded from the prior phase. The objective is to revisit the unified text at least once during this phase so that you have activated the ideas you have learned, and all ideas are ensured afresh within this week.
The reason why I call this recall and not revision week is because that’s what it does. The real objective is not to do an ‘act of revision’, the objective is to develop the ‘ability to recall’.
In my observation, I noticed many students who end up revising the text without having the true ability to recall the information when needed in exams. We will explore different retrieval techniques in coming newsletters.
3. Final Reall Day: This is the day before the exam. This is the most challenging day, especially when you’re priming for exams like law, which involves a lot of cramming. The key objective is to recall all that you have studied in prior phases in a day or maybe less than a day. It might be a daunting task for some but believe you me, it is not. This only requires a bit more planning and foresight.
The magical formula to master your memory is:
Time to recall is inversely proportional to the number of times you performed ‘recalls’.
For example, for me, it will take 3 days to properly revisit a text of 300 pages if I have only read it 2-3 times, however, I could revise the same text in an hour only if I have gone through it 5-6 times. And it is different for everyone, someone’s memory might be too brilliant to recall it in fewer iterations. In addition, it also depends on how recently you revisited.
Now, here is the punch line for you, you do not prepare for exams, you prepare for the day before exams i.e. the recall day.
All that you do during your preparation phase and recall week is only to prime yourself for a full-blown recall on the day before exams. So, that no terrain of thought or idea is blurred in your mind in the examination hall. Mentally, you must have full access to your unified texts. If you have achieved this feat before you sit to write your exams, you are almost done acing it, because the rest is all merely an execution.