How to Survive Exam Season as a College Student
Optimizing what courses to study for finals
It’s finals season. Which means late nights at the library, lots of coffee, and a lot of stress because your final grades quite literally depend on how well you do on your exams.
After having gone through finals week, year after year, I thought I’d make an ultimate guide on how get through this stressful period covering study strategies for achieving the maximum GPA you can get during finals.
What Course Should I Prioritize?
We need to prioritize our studying for exams based on three factors:
1️⃣Weight of the exam
2️⃣ How much we already know
3️⃣ When the exam is
Coming up with a plan of optimizing for which exam to study for is more important than blind studying, as this will optimize your chances of getting a higher GPA.
In general in terms of priority
Don’t spend too much time studying for final exams that aren’t worth a lot < 20%, as getting a high grade or a low grade won’t affect your GPA too much, unlike a final exam worth 35% or higher.
Don’t spend too much time studying for courses where you already know a lot of the material for the exam. Focus on courses where you know you haven’t paid attention to in class, or are harder in nature. (Remember the goal is to get the highest overall GPA).
Exams are usually spread out throughout the week and while it makes sense to focus your studying for an exam that will happen in 2 days, if that exam is not worth a lot in terms of your final grade, or you already know a lot of the material, IT IS NOT WORTH IT to prioritize that course to study. I would recommend allocating one whole day max - usually the day before the first exam to study.
This is a sample exam schedule, but given the 3 exams, I would not focus on HR until the day before (since it’s not worth that much), and instead choose to focus my time studying for Business Law and Finance 2, (both courses with higher weights and subjects that I’m weaker in).
Note: You should try rotating subjects when studying if studying one subject is too much for you
This is case dependent, and some people function better only studying one subject (left hand column), while others function better following a schedule like the one on the right. Figure out which of these study schedules works best for you and stick to it. If you follow the above tips, you’ll soon become a master at figuring out how much time to spend studying for each exam, and hence have a much better shot at getting a higher GPA.
Wishing you guys the best of luck,
Owen