Midterm week can be a stressful week for students of all grades. In most schools, Midterms weigh around 20-35% of your grade. Making the grade that you get on the test affects your grades or even the rest of your high school career.
- Create a productive study schedule.
To get the most out of your study time you need to make a schedule so that you can stay organized and orderly. Start your schedule with when you would like to wake up and pick 5 tasks to complete before starting your first study session. Start with short study sessions with 15-minute breaks in between and work yourself up to longer sessions without breaks. Each study session should be 2 hours at maximum. Make time to have meals, free time for yourself, and time for your nighttime routine.
For example:
– Wake up at 7
– Do skincare
– Eat breakfast
– Start the first study session (Should be no more than 30 minutes)
– Take a break
– Etc.
Write down this routine pick a day at least a week before your midterms and spend all day studying. This way you can get it out of the way instead of cramming the night before and risk failing from not getting enough sleep the night before. If you need to you can split the subjects into 2 separate days so you won’t burn out so quickly. Use a planner or mark it on your calendar so you don’t forget.
2. Eliminate distractions
After a couple of hours of studying, it can be hard to stay on task and not let your mind wander. You may feel tempted to start blasting music or take a 5-minute TikTok break (and we both know that break will definitely be more than 5 minutes). Before you start your study, put your phone on Do Not Disturb. If you listen to music listen to music without words like classical music.
Another thing that helps is to study in an organized area. A table near a window far away from distractions is the perfect place to study because it enables you to stay focused. My favorite ways to study are in my room, the library, or a cafe.
3. Try different studying methods
Studying it can get so boring reading textbook chapters and writing summaries. Without music or distractions, here are my favorite ways to change up my studying to make it less boring.
Use Effective Note-taking Techniques: When Taking notes it’s important to take notes that will help you understand what you are writing down and make it easier to go back over it. Some techniques that work well that I like are the Cornell method, the Pomodoro technique, and Brain dumping.
Take cute notes: When its time to take notes I like to bring colored highlighters, pens, and markers. While going over your notes having them organized by unit can make it so much more easier to go over and relearn the curriculum you learned.
Watch YouTube videos: Once you go over your notes look up YouTube videos on what you don’t understand. Watch the video all the way through and take notes on the things you are missing in your notes. Watch as many videos as you need to completely understand what you are learning.
Rewrite your notes: Combine the knowledge you learned from the YouTube videos with your original notes. This should fill all the missing gaps in your original notes making what you are learning so much easier to understand.
4. Use helpful apps: Use helpful apps to help make your studying more easy and fun. If you need help with math use MathPapa or Photomath to help you solve math problems. Notion and Goodnotes help make cute online notes and keep things more organized than paper notes. Canva and Google Slides are for making slideshows and presentations. Canva is better for cute for cute themes and fonts but Google Slides is easier to use in my opinion.
5. Remember the end goal
Remember doing these things can get you better grades and help you succeed in your future. Your dream college, better grades, and an overall easier time in school are all positive outcomes of studying more efficiently.
Start a study group
Whether it’s during school or something you do outside of school starting a study group can help you learn more with people in the classes as you. This can help you be around people who are looking to secede just like you. They can help you correct your mistakes and learn more effectively.
In conclusion, to get better grades on this semester’s Midterm hard work and effective studying will help you reach your goal.
