channel where I teach you how to study better I figured I should probably make a video on

finals. I want to make it short, I want to make to the point and I want to help you both

study more efficiently for finals and also reduce some of the stress that comes along

with finals week. To that end I have five tips that can help

you do both of those things. The first one is to no the difference between your planning

mode and your doing mode, or as I like to call it, the robot mode. The word robot is

actually an adaptation of the Czech word robotnik which translates to worker or slave. The thing

about workers and slaves is they do things, they don't plan things. As a student you got

to do both of them but you should do them at different times and you should plan before

you do. When it comes to finals you want to figure

out how many days you have until your first exam and your last exam, how much time you

actually have to study and what all you need to study during that time. Then you can make

a detailed plan for what you're going to study in order based on priorities, based on context

and mental intensity that you can put toward your studying and anything else that's pertinent.

You also want to break individual study projects into actionable steps. Something like "study

calculus" isn't really actionable, it doesn't really tell you what to do next so break that

down to something more actionable, something like get out all of your material, review

the chapter on L'H�pital's Rule or something like that, go through a practice problem set.

Just make sure your list of tasks includes things that you can sit down and definitively

achieve. Once you actually have that plan set in stone

for studying, it's time to go from planning mode and switch over to robot mode. Actually

on the College Info Geek blog I've written an article this week all about robot mode

and planning mode and gave specific examples of things you can do to make this a more efficient

process. At the end of this video I'll put up a link to that blog post where you can

go read it but first we have a few more tips to go over.

Tip number two is to know the format of your exams and them tailor those study efforts

to match those assessments. For example if one of your finals is going to be a multiple

choice test then you want to make sure you have a solid understanding of the facts in

that class and a good way to do that would to maybe build a deck of cards in Anki and

do space repetition studying or create your own study guide that asks specific questions

and then you have to answer them later. If the final's going to be based around essays

then you want to know the main ideas of what you're studying and then force yourself to

write those down in your own words. Get practice beforehand so when you actually go into the

test it's easier to do. My third tip is to base your studying efforts

around active recall. This means actually digging into your brain and forcing yourself

to bring forth information that you've learned before. The opposite of this is passive review,

simply reading a book and looking over your notes and exposing yourself to information

and it doesn't work as well as active recall. In 1885 a German psychologist named Hermann

Ebbinghaus came up with a theory he called the forgetting curve. It was his attempt to

explain how memories degrade exponentially over time. Ebbinghaus's theory is that the

strength of your memories is subject to a lot of different factors and the frequency

of active recall is one of them. If you just listen to me tell you about this guy, you're

probably not going to remember him very much later on but if you actually try to answer

this question for yourself, what did Ebbinghaus do this research, and you pause the video

and you actually do it, you're probably going to remember it later on.

My fourth tip is to review old material while you're studying. There's a site called koofers.com

where you can actually look up old tests and exam questions for your classes and you may

actually be able to find something very similar to what's going to be on your final exams.

If you can't find it on koofers, you can also look at fraternity test banks, professional

organizations and other student organizations on campus.

My fifth and final tip has to do with your stress and it's this: anticipate your failures

in advance. What I mean by this is that you probably are going to procrastinate, you're

probably going to lose willpower at some point during your studying and the most successful

students recognize this and plan ahead for it. The way you can take advantage of this

and plan ahead is to set breaks in the future that you're going to take. Maybe after 50

minutes of studying, you're going to let yourself go on Facebook or you're going to let yourself

play a video game for a while. But the key here is that you plan for this

in advance. You plan for dealing with the pain point before it actually happened. When

you do this, you're more likely to be able to move past that pain point and get back

to studying. That's it for this video but I do have a couple

other resources you can check out if you're still looking for some more tips. The first

one is my Mutant Guide to Studying for Finals, which I wrote over on the College Info Geek

blog a couple of years ago and you can find that by clicking right there. Also the article

I mentioned earlier about planning mode versus robot mode, you can find by clicking right

there. Hopefully you found these tips to be helpful. There are definitely going to be

a lot more coming in the future as I'm trying to make this channel the ultimate resource

for studying in college so definitely hit the subscribe button below if you want to

get those tips every single week. Otherwise, good luck on your finals, use these tips to

study more efficiently and please manage your stress, take breaks and make sure that you're

staying sane. Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching

my video on acing your finals. If you found it helpful you can support this channel giving

the video a like on YouTube or sharing it with a friend and also if you want to get

new videos on studying better coming out every single week on Thursdays just hit that subscribe

button that you can find right there. If you happened to miss last week's video it's over

active reading strategies, and you can find it by clicking the moving picture below there.

If you want to find any resources that I talked about in this video and extra links, they're

all listed at the companion blog post which you can find by clicking the orange button

right there. Also I have a little bit of an announcement

to make. I'm actually writing a book called Ten Steps to Earning Awesome Grades While

Studying less and it's going to be absolutely free so if you want to get that book it's

coming out right as the new semester starts in January. Click the picture of the book

right there, you can sign up for the email list or the College Info Geek blog and you

will get that book for free when it comes out in a few weeks. I'm very excited to release

it to you so definitely check it out. Also if you want to suggest any video topics or

anything else of this sort, follow me on Twitter @TomFrankly or leave a comment on this video

and I will get back to you. Thanks!