The four moves, in order
- 1
Get everything into one place, and find the holes
Every slide deck, reading, recording and photographed page for the module. Then generate a study guide — its gap list tells you what your material doesn't actually cover, which is the thing you most want to discover in week one rather than week six.
- 2
Take a diagnostic quiz before you revise anything
It will be unpleasant and it is the most valuable hour of the six weeks. You cannot allocate revision time sensibly until you know where you are weak, and your intuition about that is reliably wrong — you feel weakest at the topics you dislike, not the ones you're actually failing.
- 3
Convert every wrong answer into a flashcard
Now your deck *is* your weak areas. Review it on the FSRS schedule and the algorithm decides what you see today. You have outsourced the one decision people get catastrophically wrong.
- 4
Sit past papers under real conditions
Timed, closed book, no phone. Then generate more questions in your exam's format when the real ones run out. Everything you get wrong goes back into step three.
Why cramming feels like it works
Because it does — for about seventy-two hours. Massed study produces a real, measurable spike in recall, and if your exam is tomorrow, cram; it is the correct move and anyone who tells you otherwise is being ideological. What it does not produce is a memory that survives to the second exam of the week, or to the year you actually have to use the material. Spacing the same total hours produces dramatically better retention at essentially no extra cost. The research is unusually one-sided: cramming vs spacing.
The hour before
Do not learn anything new. The marginal fact is worth nothing and the anxiety costs you real marks in the first twenty minutes of the paper. Review the cards that are due, look at the structure of your study guide once, and stop. The focus dock in Thaxas has a breathing exercise for exactly this hour, which sounds absurd until the morning you need it.