Here are four themes that characterize excellent multiple choice preparation:
Use Successive Condensing
One of the critical factors of mastering you material is to continually have less of it on paper, and more of it in your head. I call this successive condensing. Your study notes should continually shrink until they become a very simple outline. Imagine that information is entering your brain, and leaving the page.
Limit Your Time
Your exam time is limited, why shouldn’t your study time be, too? This goes against conventional thinking, but why give yourself unlimited time? We all know that what we have to do has a tendency to expand to fit the time available. If you give yourself all day to learn material for your statistics class, it’s going to take all day.
Wouldn’t you rather learn it all in half the time, and spend some time doing other things?
Understand, Don’t Memorize
Try to learn, not memorize. Seek to understand the relationships between things.
Structure Your Material
Break the material into categories and headings. Try to take all of your course content, and fit it on one page in the form of a diagram, or a nested table of contents-style outline.
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