The study methods that help most before an exam are the ones that feel hardest: testing yourself and spreading your revision over several days.
Most students prepare differently. They reread their notes, highlight the important parts and write a summary. It feels productive, because the material seems familiar the second time round. In the exam that feeling helps little, because there you have to retrieve what you know on your own, without notes in front of you.
A large review by Dunlosky and colleagues rated ten common study techniques against the research. Only two got the top grade: practice testing and distributed practice. Rereading, highlighting and summarising came near the bottom. This guide ranks the usual study methods by how well they are supported and shows how to turn them into a study plan for the last two weeks before an exam.
Which study methods actually work
The Dunlosky review sorts study techniques into three tiers. The rating depends on how many studies there are, whether the effects hold across different learners and subjects, and whether they are still measurable days or weeks later.
That does not mean summaries are banned. They just do not replace practice. The sections below go through the methods in the order in which they help you most.
1. Test yourself: retrieval practice and practice tests
Retrieval practice, often called active recall, means pulling knowledge out of your memory instead of reading it again. That can be a flashcard, a practice problem or simply asking yourself what was on the last slide.
A well-known experiment by Roediger and Karpicke shows how big the difference is. Students who read a text once and then tested themselves three times remembered 61 percent after a week. Students who read the text four times remembered 40 percent. Shortly after studying, the reading group was ahead. Only with time did it become clear what had stuck. A later meta-analysis by Adesope and colleagues reached the same conclusion across many studies: practice tests beat rereading.
How to put it into practice:
- After each section of your notes, close them and write down what you still know. Then compare.
- Turn every slide into a question whose answer you will need in the exam.
- Work through practice problems before looking at the solution, even when you feel unsure. Mistakes during practice are part of the process.
2. Spread your study out instead of cramming
Distributed practice means revisiting material at intervals over several days instead of working through it in one long session. A meta-analysis by Cepeda and colleagues of more than 300 experiments shows that this works clearly better than cramming. The longer you need to remember something, the longer the gaps can be.
The easiest way to do this is with flashcards and spaced repetition. The app works out when you are about to forget a card and shows it to you just then. We compare which apps work well at university in our flashcard app comparison.
One thing matters: spaced repetition only works if you do a short session every day. Twenty minutes a day achieves more than three hours on a Sunday.
3. Past papers as a dress rehearsal
Past papers are practice tests in their most realistic form. They show you which topics your module tests, in what format and how much time you have per question. Above all, they show you where you really stand.
How to get the most out of them:
- Sit them under real conditions: with a time limit, without notes, without your phone.
- Follow up straight away: every question you could not answer becomes a topic on your list.
- Do not memorise them: if you learn the answers to a past paper by heart, you are practising recognition. Redo it a few days later or work through similar questions.
If there are only a few past papers for your module, ask older students or your course society, or build your own practice exam from problem sheets.
4. Mix it up and explain it
Three methods get a moderate rating in the review: interleaved practice, self-explanation and asking why. They pay off especially when you need to understand and apply the material.
Interleaved practice means alternating between types of problems instead of doing ten of the same kind in a row. It is harder, but it trains exactly what the exam asks of you: recognising which method fits which problem.
Self-explanation means explaining to yourself why each step of a solution works. A practical form of it is the Feynman technique: you explain a topic so simply that someone without background knowledge would understand it. Wherever you get stuck is your gap.
Asking why means not learning facts in isolation. Why does the curve rise here? Why does the rule only apply under this condition? Once you know the answer, the detail is easier to remember.
What helps less than it feels
Some popular methods have their place, as long as they do not replace practice.
- Rereading and highlighting: useful on a first pass to understand the material. As revision just before the exam they achieve little.
- Summaries and study notes: writing them helps you organise the material. Afterwards, study by asking yourself questions about them. Our guide on making study notes from lecture slides with AI shows how.
- Mind maps: good for seeing connections and structuring a topic. Whether you actually know the material only shows when you answer a question without the map.
- The Pomodoro technique: it is a time tool rather than a study method. 25 minutes of work and a 5-minute break help many people get started and keep distractions out. What you do during those 25 minutes decides how much you learn.
How to make a study plan: the last 14 days before the exam
A study plan puts the methods in order. Plan backwards from the exam date, so you can see straight away whether you have enough time.
- Days 14 to 10: work through the material. Go through every topic once and write questions or flashcards for each section. Start with the topics that come up most often in past papers.
- Days 9 to 5: practise and mix. Work through practice problems from all topics, mixed together. Review your flashcards every day. Whatever does not work goes on a gap list.
- Days 4 to 2: dress rehearsal. Sit past papers under real conditions and follow up on your mistakes the same day.
- Day 1: gaps only. No new topics. Go through your gap list and the difficult flashcards, and stop in good time in the evening.
A study day in this plan has three parts. First a short round of flashcards to switch your mind to recall. Then the main block with new material or practice problems, split into sessions with breaks. At the end, five minutes in which you write down without notes what you learned today and add to your gap list. Those last five minutes are themselves retrieval practice.
If you have more time, stretch the phases. If you have less, shorten the first pass and start practising earlier. Testing yourself is the phase you should cut least.
How AI can help you prepare for exams
AI tools can save you a lot of preparation work: they create practice questions, flashcards and practice exams from your material. They can also do your thinking for you, and that hurts. In a study with around 1,000 secondary school students, those who practised with an AI model without guardrails did worse in the exam afterwards than the control group. With an AI tutor designed not to simply give away the answer, that effect did not appear.
The rule of thumb: let AI ask you questions and give you feedback, and solve the problems yourself. We compare which tools are good for what in our overview of the best AI study tools.
acemate is built for exactly this routine: from your slides, lecture notes and past papers it creates practice questions with feedback, flashcards with a review schedule and new practice exams in the style of your past papers. The Knowledge Graph shows which topics still belong on your gap list.
With or without a tool: plan the next two weeks backwards from the exam date and test yourself for a few minutes every day.
