The evening between two papers
There is a particular evening in every exam run: one paper done, badly or at least it felt that way, and another one tomorrow. What happens in the next few hours matters more than anything you could still revise, and almost everyone spends them the same wrong way.
The post-mortem is the trap
The finished paper is the most interesting thing in the room and the only thing that cannot be changed. Comparing answers, looking up question four, working out how many marks you have lost — none of it moves a single mark, and all of it costs the thing tomorrow needs.
Anxiety works by taking attentional control away from the task in front of you and giving it to the threat. The cost shows up as efficiency: the same result for much more effort, or less result for the same effort (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos & Calvo, Emotion, 2007). An evening of re-running today is a withdrawal from tomorrow's account.
You also cannot simply decide to stop. "Don't think about it" has a perfect record of not working. What does work is giving the thought somewhere to go and something dull to do instead.
Close it in writing
Two minutes, on paper: what you think went wrong, in whatever detail it wants. Then fold it and put it somewhere you will not see it until the exams are done. It is written down, so it does not have to stay in your head, and there is nothing else to be done with it tonight.
If you want the number rather than the feeling, work out what is actually still reachable on the free grade calculator instead of estimating it at midnight. Estimating at midnight is always worse than the truth.
Then two short blocks, not a marathon
The temptation after a bad paper is to overcorrect and revise until midnight for the next one. Spaced study episodes produce better final retention than the same material studied back to back (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer, Psychological Bulletin, 2006) — so the same minutes split into two blocks with a real gap leave more behind than one long sitting, and you will finish them.
Closed book, both times. If you can see the answer, you are reading rather than revising, and reading is what makes an evening feel productive while leaving nothing behind.
And then stop, early
After a single night of sleep deprivation, hippocampal activity during learning dropped and people retained less of what they studied (Yoo, Hu, Gujar, Jolesz & Walker, Nature Neuroscience, 2007). The hour you take from sleep tonight is taken from your ability to take anything in tomorrow — in the middle of an exam run, that is the worst possible trade.
Decide the stopping time before the evening starts, not while you are in it.
One evening, in order
- Food first. No revision talk until after it.
- Two minutes writing down what went wrong, then it goes away.
- Twenty-five minutes, closed book, on tomorrow's subject.
- A real gap. Outside if possible. Not "just looking over" anything.
- Twenty-five more, then finished for the night, whatever state it is in.
- Last ten minutes on things you already know. End on something easy.
If the run of papers is being managed by a parent as much as by you, the other half of this is what to say when they come out of the exam on Versed Learn.
Versed is free in a browser — a study timer, a grade calculator and flashcards, most of it with no account at all. If tonight would go better with a timer than with willpower, it is at versedapps.com.