essay memorisation framework

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How to Study for Exams - An Evidence-Based Masterclass

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Being able to study efficiently and effectively is a superpower. As students, it boost our grades, reduces our stress levels and frees up our time to do more interesting things. But we're never taught how to do it. Most of us rely on 'intuitive' techniques like rereading, note-taking, summarising and highlighting to get through our exams. But as the evidence shows, these intuitive techniques are often counter-productive.

In this class, I'll take you through the well-kept secrets of how to study effectively. We'll break down (1) how to understand our content using techniques like the Feynman Method, Active Recall and various note-taking strategies, (2) how to remember our material with Spaced Repetition, Interleaving and various memory techniques, and (3) how to maintain focus while studying, from developing the motivation and discipline to do the work, to taking appropriate breaks and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. 

I was a medical student at Cambridge University (UK) from 2012-2018. In my second year of medical school, I discovered the research around effective studying and memory enhancement, and it completely changed my life. By using the strategies you'll learn in this class, I was able to start and grow a 6-figure business and later a successful YouTube channel while still getting pretty decent marks in my exams, and actually enjoying the whole process with a minimal level of stress. 

Now that I'm a doctor working in the UK's National Health Service (NHS), I still use these techniques when preparing teaching sessions for medical students, and when preparing for my own postgraduate medical exams. These days, my time is even more limited than it was when I was a student, but by using the appropriate study techniques, I can keep on top of the workload while still running my business, YouTube channel and having some semblance of a social life. 

So thanks for stopping by - I hope you dive in and you can gain something from this class that you can apply to your own life. 

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A Doctor Shared the 'Memory Hack' He Used to Ace Exams at Cambridge

Dr. Ali Abdaal breaks down his system for committing entire essays to memory.

Cramming for an exam is, let's be honest, one of the least fun ways to spend your time. There's the pressure to get a good grade, mixed with the fatigue and sheer boredom of reading, re-reading and highlighting text in the hope that it'll sink in. And there's always the risk that something will come up on the test that you didn't prepare for.

In a new video, YouTuber and Cambridge University graduate Dr. Ali Abdaal outlines the system he used to prepare for essay-based exam questions while he was studying medicine, and which ended up winning him a first-place essay prize.

He explains that he was able to write entire essays on demand, by first creating detailed essay plans for every conceivable essay question that might arise in an exam, and then using active recall, spaced repetition, spider diagrams and flashcards to commit them to memory. The idea is to be able to essentially "upload" whole essays into your memory so that you can then regurgitate them at will.

The creation stage

First, Abdaal advises trying to come up with a range of essay titles which cover the breadth of the class. "The easiest way to do this is to look at what past papers are available, and see what essays have come up in the past," he says. "Then you can put yourself in an examiner's shoes and think 'what is a good essay we've not yet asked about.'"

From there, you come up with an outline for each title, ensuring that you have a killer introduction which sets up a proper structure that fulfils the requirements of the essay (i.e. it actually answers the question) and stands out from the dozens of similar papers that the examiner will be reading.

The memory stage

Abdaal uses the free flashcard software Anki to create "blocks" of content which he can slot into his essays from memory. He then creates a spider diagram for each essay, which breaks down the different sections of the essay, with keywords referring to specific flashcards.

Once he had created these tools, he would work away at memorizing them using spaced repetition, where he would revisit the material with greater and greater intervals of time between each studying session to improve his memory. He would also log each time he studied an essay in his retrospective revision timetable, marking the date and color-coding the entry according to how well he knew the material on that date.

"Over time, this became a really effective way to systematically use active recall to ensure I knew absolutely everything," he says. "This method ended up working really well for me.

One additional benefit to this technique, he adds, is that it is even helpful in the rare instance of a left-field question, as you can "build" brand new essay answers on the fly using the material you've learned: "Even if stuff comes up that you haven't memorized, you'll know so much about the subject, and you'll have so many content blocks in your head, that you'll be able to generate a first-class essay from scratch."

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Video   Study Tips - Essay Memorisation Framework

• Thread starter MSO Articles
• Start date Mar 10, 2021
• MSO Articles
• Mar 10, 2021

This is a summary of Ali Abdaal’s YouTube Video : How I Ranked 1st at Cambridge University - The Essay Memorisation Framework. The original YouTube video can be found here: How I ranked 1st at Cambridge University - The Essay Memorisation Framework ​ Click to expand...

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• Aug 13, 2021

very nice description!  

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welcome back to the channel . If you are new here , my name is Ali

I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge and in this video

I'm going to share with you the essay memorization framework that I

used when I was in my third year at Cambridge University .

That was the year ,

in which I was studying psychology and I actually ended up winning the prize for best

exam performance in the year ( yay ) group and I' ve pretty much exclusively

attributed that to this essay memorization framework

This method should work for most essay based subjects ,

but even if your subject is an essay based

I hope you might still find this video useful and pick up a

few tips and techniques along the way and of course , everything I'm

going to mention is going to be linked in timestamps in the video

description and in a pinned comment so you can skip around the

video if you feel like it , let 's just jump into it

So there are basically two stages to this method .

The first stage is the creation stage

and the second stage is the memorization stage .

So in the creation stage , the objective is to create

first - class essay plans for every conceivable

essay title that they could throw at us in the exam .

And in the memorization stage ,

we ' re going to be committing all of these essay plans to memory

by systematically using active recall , spaced repetition ,

spider diagrams , and flashcards .

The idea is that by the time the exam rolls around ,

you ' ll have memorized so many essay plans that a lot of them will

just come up in the exam anyway

because you ' ve predicted the titles and you ' ll just

be able to regurgitate stuff from your brain onto the paper ,

but even if stuff comes up that you haven 't memorized

You ' ll know so much about the subject and you ' ll have so many

content blocks in your head that you ' ll be able to generate a first - class

Essay from scratch .

So that was a general overview .

Let 's now talk about the two components : the creation state and the memorization stage in turn .

So the broad objective of the creation stage is to create a large

number of really really good essay plans that you can then memorize

In the memorization stage and regurgitate onto paper during your exam .

Now , it 's probably beyond the scope of this video for me

to teach you how to write a good essay and

probably also beyond the scope of my own expertise .

But I will share some tips on three main questions and that 's

firstly how you decide what essay titles to pick .

Secondly , how you plan the essay and thirdly how you make sure your essay plan is really really good .

So let 's deal with those in turn so firstly how do we decide what I say is we ' re going to prepare

the objective here is to scope the subject and find essay

titles that cover the entire breadth of the syllabus . Now the easiest way to

do this is to look at past papers and look at whatever pause papers you

have available and see what essays have come up in

the past and you start off with those and then once you ' ve planned

out those essays , you ' ll know enough about that subject in particular

that you ' ll be able to put yourself in the shoes of examiner 's and start thinking ,

" okay

what 's a good essay titled that I' ve not yet asked about ?"

If you haven 't got past papers available that I'm very sorry to hear that .

You ' re just gonna have to put yourself into the examiners shoes from the get - go

or you can actually go to your teacher , your professor , your lecturer , or whatever and say , " hey ,

what 's the sort of essays that might come up in the exam ? What are some things other things

I should be thinking about ?

So , having made a list of what essays we ' re going to plan ,

we then need to actually plan those essays and this is the fun part .

This is the part that actually requires doing some doing some cognitive labor

So the way I would do this is that I'd give myself one day per essay plan .

So in , in the first time of uni

I was a slacker only made like five essay plans .

In the second term I made about ten , and then , in the Easter holidays

i' ve really ramped it up and made about 35 different ones .

And the way I do it is that i'd start off with a question .

So , for example , do animals have a theory of mind and then I would use Google

To get as much information as I can about that particular question

I would ignore the lecture notes initially

and I would ignore the recommended reading

I'd start off with Google because Google was , it was like a really

good way to find the answer to any question that you want .

And often I'd be linked to review articles and review papers ,

and I'd be reading through those review papers

Oftentimes , the review paper would directly answer the question ,

in which case I' ve pretty much got my essay .

I just need to turn it into my own words ,

but a lot of the time , I'd be following references from the route

from the review paper . And then ,

once I'd created my essay plan

I would then look at the lecture notes and the recommended reading

and this meant that a lot of my material was hopefully more original

than everyone else 's because most of the students

would have built their essays based around the lecture notes .

Whereas I was building my essays on a random Google search .

So , I would start off by creating a research document on

that particular topic and pretty much copy and paste every relevant bit of every

paper I could find .

So , this is my 10 page document about theory of mind .

I' ve copied and pasted various bits and rephrased various bits .

And you know , very random . I don 't even know any of this anymore .

This is , and you , know included links at the bottom to

where I got the information from so if I need to return to it ,

I' ll be able to find it again .

And then once I' ve got my research document , I spent the next few hours

planning out the essay and actually writing it out properly .

So , here is my plan , " Is theory of mind a useful concept for understanding social cognition and animals ?" And

yeah , I' ve got an intro , I' ve got a preamble , I' ve got subheadings ,

I' ve got evidence

And I' ve basically taken all of this from these various

different resources from books , from the review papers , from the lecture notes , from Google .

And I' ve consolidated them into this one essay that I'm

ultimately going to memorize . And as you can see over here ,

I' ve pretty much done this for everything within my subject .

So this is Section B, " Comparative Cognition ,"

which is all about the thinking of animals , can an animal 's plan for the future ?

Causality , Cognitive Maps , the Convergent Evolution Theory of Intelligence .

" Do animals have a theory of mind ?" " Is a theorem an useful concept ." And you can see here ,

I' ve written an key beside them ,

which is a foreshadowing as to what 's gonna come later in this video .

So now we ' ve done a research document . We ' ve planned this essay .

We ' ve pretty much written it out based on a research document

and we ' ve only given ourselves one day to do this because of Parkinson 's law .

That work expands to fill the time we allocate to it .

But how do we make the essay plan actually good .

A lot of things go into good essay plan

but in my opinion , there are three things that count .

Number one , structure

Number two , actually answering the question .

And number three ,

having a bit of flair , a bit of a spice that you ' re sprinkling in your essay plan .

And I think the introduction is the most important part of the essay .

because in the introduction , you can signal to the examiner that

you ' re doing all three of these things and when the examiner is marking your paper .

They ' re probably really bored ,

they ' ve read hundreds of these scripts already .

You want to hit them with like a really legit introduction .

So here 's an example of an introduction from one of my essays about ,

" Weather judgment and decision making is cognitive ,

ideological , or affective ie . emotional ."

So , I written that , " The historical view in social sciences has always been that judgments

are based solely on content information , with individuals being assumed

to form judgments by systematically evaluating all available

content information in an unbiased manner ."

Oh my god .

However , over the past three decades a considerable

amount of research has challenged this assumption by showing that

Judgments may be formed not only

on the basis of content information ( cognitive judgments )

but also on the basis of feelings ( affective judgment ).

It is now well accepted that judgment can be both effective and cognitive ."

And here 's where the good stuff comes

" Whether it is one of the other depends on a multitude of factors ;

(1) the salience of the affective feelings , (2) the

representativeness of the affective feelings for the target ,

(3) the relevance of the feelings to the judgment , (4) the evaluative

malleability of the judgment , and (5) the level of processing intensity .

And here is the ultimate clincher for this .

"I will discuss these in

turn and ultimately argue that generally speaking in day - to - day life ,

the circumstances are generally those that result an effective rather

than cognitive and decision - making ."

So , if we can disentangle all the verbosity from that paragraph , what I' ve done is I' ve

laid out the five main bits of the essay , in terms of structure

and I' ve used numbered points for that rather than just a list

because numbered makes it really really obvious to the examiner that I' ve got

a good structure . I' ve also said exactly what the answer to the question is .

The question is asking whether our judgments are cognitive ,

( biological ?), or affective emotional and instead of wishingwatching around it ,

I have said in this essay , "I will argue that they are

emotional rather than cognitive in most elements of day - to - day life ."

So I'm telling the examiner , " Look , I'm answering the question ,

this is what you ' re gonna get from me ." And finally I' ve added a little bit of flair .

Hopefully with this stuff about the historical context

I probably got that from a textbook or from a review paper somewhere

and I' ve probably phrased into my own notes

and obviously this is just my plan .

So in the exam , I won 't quite be using it word - for - word .

So , it 's absolutely not plagiarism .

It 's using , you know , useful resources to create a bit of flair by adding a bit of historical context .

So hopefully this introduction covers all three points :

structure , answering question , and a bit of flair .

Now , I'm gonna leave it at that for this section of the video .

Obviously , you know , there are entire university courses andentire books

and stuff , devoted to the art of writing a good essay .

I don 't personally think I'm very good at writing an essay ,

but I think I'm pretty good at using Google effectively and copying and pasting

stuff into a research word document and then turning it into

fairly legit sounding prose and

then , I think I'm pretty good at systematically memorizing all that information .

if you want to know more about how to write an essay ,

how I write an essay , then let me know in the comments and

I' ll maybe try and do a video on it if I can kind of break down the process a bit further .

But now let 's talk about stage two of the process :

The memorization stage .

Okay , so by this point ,

we ' ve got a load of really good essay plans that we have created

in Word documents . Now the objective in the memorization stage is to

upload , all of those essay plans to our brain so that we canthen regurgitate

them in the exam and we ' re gonna do this using

three main techniques : Number one , ANKI flashcards .

Number two , spider diagrams

And number three , a retrospective revision timetable .

Let 's talk about these in turn .

So firstly , ANKI , and I' ve basically used Anki flashcards to memorize

every paragraph , in every essay plan and this might seem a bit overkill , but it worked for me .

So what I' ve done is as you can see ,

I' ve got keywords on the front of the card like " Bauer in 1984"

or " Damisch et al 2006" or " Ellis

et al 1997," or short - term versus long - term memory introduction .

I' ve even put the introduction into an ANKI flashcard and then over time

I' ll memorize

these , because pretty much anything that goes into my ANKI flashcards

because during the exam term , I'm going through my flashcards every single day and

I'm doing and keep spaced repetition algorithm .

I just know that anything that that 's in my ANKI is

just going to get uploaded to my brain with a

small amount of effort put in , by me , to actually actually memorize this stuff .

So yeah , I' ve got I' ve got the keywords and I' ve got the content .

So basically if I put you know a paper , Russell & Fehr in 1987."

I'm describing in the ANKI flashcard what that paper shows , which means that overall I' ve

create these blocks of content that every ANKI flashcard is his own little block

and that block can slot into my essay that I' ve planned .

But also , if a weird essay comes up that I haven 't explicitly planned ,

I still have all these blocks of knowledge in my head ,

and that means if there is a paper that 's relevant

I' ll know what it is . I' ll know what the reference is . I' ll know what the content is .

I' ll know how to describe the experiment and I' ll just be able to put it into

even new essays that I'm writing on the spot in the exam .

So that 's all well and good , but obviously knowing

Tversky and Kahneman experiment from 1974 or Mussweiler & Strack from 2000,

those things aren 't that helpful ,

unless you can also associate them with their own essays andthat 's

where the spider diagrams is coming .

All right ,

so the second prong of the memorization stage of the essay memorization

framework involves spider diagrams

and this is the book that I have made almost five diagrams in . So ,

having memorized a ton of content blocks from my essays using ANKI flashcards .

What I' ve now done is from the 20 th of April onwards ,

I made spider diagrams , one - page diagrams of every single essay .

So , here 's the first one about implicit versus explicit memory .

We ' ve done , you know , various topics of the memory , cognitive maps , metacognition .

And the idea is that we ' ve pretty much got the whole structure of the essay along with the

keywords in the spider diagram .

So , this is the essay about short - term memory bus a long - term memory ,

it starts off with an introduction .

Then , something about single system memory .

Then , something about the two components and if we zoom in over here ,

we see I' ve written G Plus C

1966 and that actually refers to the flashcard over here where I talk

about , " Glanzer and Cunitz

1966." And in my flashcard , I' ve got the con and blog where I'm describing the experiment

and actually , this is just like a whole paragraph . Another G n' C experiment . This G

1972 is a Glanzer . Craik

1970 B and H is Baddeley and someone else , I think I' ve Bob Baddeley and Hitch . Yeah in 1977.

So , I have all these content blocks in ANKI and I' ve just put

the keywords onto the spider diagram so that when I'm creating the

spider diagram and I write G Plus C 1966,

I know exactly what that refers to obviously I' ve never forgotten before years laters .

But , I used to know exactly what that referred to back in the day and

I' ve done this for every single one of the 40 50 essays that I' ve memorized and the way this would work

is that every day , I would just draw out the various spider diagrams from memory .

So , on the 20 th of April , as we can see over here ,

I did implicit vs explicit , recollection vs familiarity , semantics vs episodic ,

short - term vs long - term memory . Then on the 21 st , I did future planning ,

I did theory of mind , I did theory of mind useful - usefulness ,

meta cognition , cognitive Maps .

Gosh , personality genes , black - and - white differences in IQ intelligence , controversial subject

The Flynn effect explanation , multiple intelligent .

Well , I was plenty very productive on the 21 st of April , 2015.

But the point is , that every single day I'd be drawing out these

spider diagrams from memory and if there were any bits that I didn 't know

or that was shaky on , I would look up on my

master spider diagram or in my master essay plan or in ANKI

and I'd actively work on those . So over time this ended up being

like a really effective way to

systematically use active recall to ensure that I knew absolutely

everything and like in the time before the exam

I was just bashing through these so ,

you know , 8 th of May we ' ve done this one . We ' ve done this one .

We ' ve done that one , another one , another one , another one , another one . I think that 's all on the 8 th of May , another one .

Oh , wow . Yeah . This was like about a week before our exams .

And on the 8 th of May . I' ve just absolutely bashed through and

planned about you know , I'm just like drawing out my plans for about 15 different essays .

So we ' ve got our content blocks and ANKI we ' ve memorized them using ANKI .

We ' ve got our , kind of essay structures using spider diagrams .

We ' ve memorized them using active recall .

The final piece of the puzzle involves systemic spaced repetition .

So how do I decide what I was going to do each day

if you ' ve seen any of my revision videos you might have come

across the idea of the retrospective revision timetable and that was what I used .

I' ve made a whole video on this

I'm not gonna talk about it in depth .

Basically , actually , I'm just gonna show you here . Where are we ? No , here we go

This was my retrospective revision timetables .

So , its split up into section A, section B, and Section C.

So , let 's see , implicit versus explicit memory . Ah , here we go . This actually works

So on the 20 th of April , I studied implicit versus explicit memory .

So I' ve marked down the date as the 20 th of April

and then I' ve marked down all the various things that are than 20 th of

April and then I think on the 21 st , I did some of B and C.

Yep , so you can see on the 21 st of April , when I active

recalled these essay plans over here .

Wherever they are . I have marked them in the retrospective sheet .

And then the idea , is that the next time I do them ,

I am marking the date for that and then I'm color coding it in red , yellow , green ,

whatever , depending on how well I knew at the time .

So I' ve been doing , I' ve done this for all the essays that I memorized and

and I' ve done it for all of my subjects within psychology .

So there 's much more detail in the video

specifically by the

retrospective revision timetable where I explain exactly how it works ,

how I'd recommend using it and why I think it 's better than a standard prospector

version time table . But yeah , that is the third prong

of the memorization stage of the essay memorization framework .

So , that was an overview of the essay memorization framework that I used to

systematically memorize about 45 to 50 different essay plans

using a mixture of active recall , spaced repetitions , flashcards and

spider diagrams and that ended up going quite well for me .

spider diagrams and that ended up going quite well for me . In the actual exam ,

I think about two - thirds of the essay titles out of the , I think , 12 essays

we had to write , I think eight of them , what essays that were part of my block of 50 are like I'd,

I'd already planned them .

So it was pretty , pretty easy enough to just regurgitate

what I already knew onto the page , which was awesome .

But then , about a third of them , about four of the essays were new ,

they 'd never been asked before , I hadn 't predicted them . But ,

because I knew so much about these subjects like ,

you know , at the time , if you 'd ask me any question at all about ,

you know , the animal - animal psychology or if you 'd ask me any question at all

about IQ or intelligence or personality or

short - term memory , long - term memory or I don 't know judgment decision - making .

I knew so much about those subjects based on memorizing all these essays , that it was pretty

straightforward to build an essay from scratch in about ten minutes in the exam .

So I would just plan it out using my spider diagram and then regurgitate .

U- using my own content blocks from my ANKI flashcards

But also just being able to write whatever I wanted because I knew the subject so well .

So the method ended up working reasonably well for me .

Me and another student . We won the joint award for best exam performance .

I later emailed my supervisor and he actually said that she beat me by a few like ,

you know , decimals of a percentage point .

But because the two of us were so far ahead of everyone else , they

decided very kindly to jointly awarded us the prize for best exam performance .

So technically , I didn 't come first , actually came second , but that would make for a less clickbaity title .

So apologies for that .

If I' ve misled you thus far .

Anyway , I hope you found this video useful and took something away from it .

This method worked really really well for me and I kind of wish I'd been more

systematic about my revision in this way in

subsequent years ,

but after peaking in third year , I decided that I wanted to other things .

Ended up kind of reverting to

inefficient habits like rereading and highlighting and stuff .

in my fourth , fifth , and sixth year , but still

you know having this stuff in the back of my mind meant that

I was able to use my retrospective revision timetable to

efficiently get pretty reasonable marks in the exams while also sustaining

a side career of running a business and running a YouTube channel

which I don 't think I'd have been able to do if I hadn 't been efficient with my studying

and which is why , you know , all

these tips , you know ,

i- it 's useful to use efficient study tips because ,

A, if you want you can put in loads of time and get really really good marks

but if you want to do all the stuff on the side ,

it means you have the time to do all the stuff on the site .

So that worked really well for me . So , thank you

so much for watching .

I really hope you got something useful out of this video .

If you have any questions , please feel free to leave a comment

down below and I will reply to the comments ,

but I' ll also put a link in the description to a page about this thing on my website , where I will

put all of the commonly asked questions

and answers that I' ll be able to expand more in depth .

So if you do have specific questions about this method

have a look at the comments , have a look at my website

because it 's probably easier to read the answers there directly

rather than trawling through YouTube comments .

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How To Study: Active Recall – The ‘High Utility’ Technique You Should Be Using

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If rereading, highlighting and summarising aren’t effective methods of revising, then what should we be doing? The two most effective methods that I’ve come across are  active recall  and  spaced repetition  which, in combination, will help make your studies more efficient, effective and rewarding. I’ll cover spaced repetition in a future post but for now I’ll concentrate on active recall.

Active Recall Theory and Evidence

We often think that learning is a process whereby you test yourself after having learnt all the information. Surely it’s counterintuitive to do anything else? In fact, this can’t be further from the truth!

Active recall involves retrieving information from memory through, essentially, testing yourself at every stage of the revision process. The very act of retrieving information and data from our brains not only strengthens our ability to retain information but also improves connections in our brains between different concepts.

Research from  2013  which analysed hundreds of separate studies about effective revision techniques, concluded that testing, or active recall, is a technique that has ‘high utility’ and can be implemented effectively with minimal training.

“On the basis of the evidence…we rate practice testing as having high utility. Testing effects have been demonstrated across an impressive range of practice-test formats, kinds of material, learner ages, outcome measures, and retention intervals. Thus, practice testing has broad applicability”.

These studies from  1939  and  2010  provide valuable verification of the effectiveness of active recall but it was a study from  2011  that I found particularly convincing.

In that study, the researchers split students into 4 groups with each student tasked with learning the same material before being tested on what they learnt. However, each group was given different instructions and parameters for learning the content.

– The first group would read the material only once.

– The second group would read the material four times.

– The third group would read the material then were told to make a mind map.

– The fourth group would read the material once, then recall as much as possible.

In both the verbatim test – when asked to recall facts – as well as the inference test – when asked to recall concepts – the active recall group significantly outperformed the other groups.

This study shows that testing yourself  just once  is more effective than rereading a chapter four times. I’m sure we’ve all used rereading at some point but simply through testing yourself  once  you could drastically improve the efficacy and efficiency of your studies. This is such a simple technique but has such substantial, obvious benefits that we would be foolish to not use it!

Perhaps the reason we don’t like to use active recall is that it’s more difficult and mentally taxing than rereading. But the key point is  revision should be cognitively demanding!  It’s useful to think about this in terms of going to the gym – if you’re lifting weights that are light, you’re not going to make much progress but if you’re lifting weights that test your strength, you’re more likely to develop muscle faster. It’s the same with developing the ‘muscle’ of your brain – the harder we have to work to retrieve information, the more effective our brains will become in storing and recalling that information in the future.

Active Recall Strategies

So, how can we apply active recall in our own studies? Are there any strategies that are more effective? Well, first of all, almost anything we do that requires us to use cognitive effort and brain power to retrieve information is going to be helpful. However, more specifically, I used a number of strategies which utilised active recall and below are three approaches that, personally, I’ve found useful.

Closed Book

If you can’t quite break the habit of making notes, one strategy I found particularly helpful was making notes with your book closed. Instead of copying directly out of the textbook, try to learn a topic before writing out how you would explain the key points and key concepts in your own words but with the book closed. Once you’ve written down as much as you can remember, open the book and add the parts you missed.

This may sound simplistic and, in many respects, it is! However, it was particularly effective when I was preparing for my third year exams in psychology when I’d made essay plans and, in order to commit them to memory, I decided to draw spider diagrams of each plan with my book closed. I’d draw out as much as I could from memory and afterwards go back to my actual plan and fill in any information that was missing.

I repeated this for about two months in the lead up to the exams – combining active recall with spaced repetition – and by the time the exams came round I had a good grasp of over 50 essays, each with references, which I could then draw upon in the exam.

So it’s a simple strategy but if it can work for third year university exams, I’m sure you can find a way of making it work for your personal needs too.

Alternative to Making Notes…Ask Questions

Despite evidence showing that note-taking  isn’t  an effective revision technique, it still feels intuitively productive to write things down, right? I didn’t want to completely stop making notes so I tried to adapt this desire to make notes and began to write questions for myself.

This strategy resembles the ‘Cornell Note-Taking’ method – the process of writing questions for yourself based upon the material in the syllabus. This produces a list of questions with the main idea being that instead of passively rereading or highlighting the information as we’re often tempted to do, we’re forced to  actively engage  in cognitive effort to retrieve the information to answer the questions which strengthens connections between information in our brains and improves our ability to recall that information in an exam.

In essence, writing questions forces you to engage in cognitive effort and the more brain power it takes to recall a fact, the more mentally taxing your studies are and the more you’re going to gain from the time you put into revision.

Anki is a flashcard app that allows you to create online flashcards which you can use to test yourself in practice sessions. It uses an algorithm built around active recall and spaced repetition and hence learns as you progress through your studies and revision.

I found Anki particularly useful for two key reasons:

• Firstly, memorising particular facts – for example, as a medical student I used it a lot for pharmacology – learning the names of drugs and what they do.
• Secondly, I also used it to help memorise particular paragraphs that I could slot into appropriate essays.

Check out the video for how I specifically did this but I certainly found it incredibly helpful! In fact, one of my friends from university who consistently ranked at the top of our year in terms of exam results found Anki so useful that he switched from making notes in lectures to going straight to making flashcards with the app! If that isn’t a positive endorsement of how useful it can be, I don’t know what is!

And if you’d like to read more of my Studying articles,  head to this page here  which includes pieces on  The Essay Memorisation Framework  and  The Power of Retrospective Revision Timetables .

About The Author

I'm an ex-doctor turned YouTuber, Podcaster, entrepreneur and author. I've been creating YouTube videos for over 7 years and have a following of over 4 million over on my main channel.

I’ve been on the hunt for better study techniques, because I wasn’t great in Undergrad. Active recall has been a tough one to grasp. But this is helpful Ali. I’m practicing these techniques before I start my program in January. Looking forward to more.

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The Top 10 Digital Study Tools for Exam Season

The exam season requires us to be efficient and intentional with our study habits, plans, and time management. In this article, we’ll share digital study tools that can help you to implement well-known study techniques like active recall and spaced repetition; plan your life with your to-do list and wellbeing in mind, and manage your time while tracking your progress over time.

Tools for Studying Efficiently and Effectively 

GitMind (PC and Mobile Application) ‍

GitMind is a mind mapping tool for bringing your “inner universe” to life. You can begin to visualise ideas, concepts and their connections using text, images, hyperlinks and icons. This tool makes it easy to customise your mind maps with colours, present your expanding ideas to others with transitions, and switch between mind map and outline modes. Beyond mind maps, this tool also supports the creation flowcharts, organisational charts and a wide variety of diagrams. GitMind can make it easy to implement active recall style revision and learning techniques. You could use this tool to scope your subject , or memorise essays as mentioned in the essay memorisation framework . 

NeuroCache (Android and IOS App) ‍

NeuroCache is your “long-term memory assistant” that makes implementing active recall and spaced repetition easy . Active recall is a learning principle for memorising information effectively, encouraging you to bring information to mind without looking back at notes or prompts. This technique is often paired with spaced repetition , a timeframe that predicts when you’re likely to forget something and should recall it to strengthen your memory. NeuroCache makes using these two techniques seamless by integrating with your note-taking applications such Notion, Evernote, OneNote, and even markdown files or tweets. From your note-taking applications, you can define flashcards that you can continue to review and recall with their spaced repetition algorithms . 

Genei (Web Application) ‍

Genei is an AI-powered research tool that automatically summarises your reading material. You can work through and organise your reading list using folders, sub-folders, and track your progress by marking things as read or unread. This tool provides more than powerful summarisation, making it easy to research effectively with note-taking and annotation features. These capabilities are perfect for compiling revision material, especially for your active recall flashcards or notes. Your AI-powered summaries can be inserted into genei notepad, and easily transferred to other note-taking or flashcard tools. 

UniMate (Android and IOS App) ‍

UniMate is a grade calculator app for university students. Planning in advance is one of the best ways to manage your stress during exam season . This app makes it simple to track your grades across modules, and see your upcoming deadlines. The best part is UniMate will calculate your grade average for you, making it easy to see how you’re progressing during the year and throughout your degree. If you’re worried about whether or not you’re on track, there’s also a feature for calculating the predicted grades you need to achieve your dream degree classification. 

Tools for Planning and Managing Tasks

Shovel (Mobile and Web Application) ‍

Shovel is a planner designed for students that prioritises time-boxing , a technique for scheduling tasks for a fixed time into your calendar. This app combines your calendar and to-do list to make timeboxing easy, and integrates with your academic platforms and other calendars to make importing tasks and events seamless. Outline your schedule with events, and then slot in your tasks that already have an assigned duration into your free time. Shovel makes it simple to work around your events, and re-plan tasks if things change. This way, both your scheduled events, and important to-dos are accounted for, allowing you to have peace of mind that you’re on track. 

Google Calendar (Mobile and Web Application) ‍

Google Calendar ( gcal) is a classic but powerful tool for organising your life, tasks and goals. Similar to Shovel, gcal has a feature called Google Tasks that makes it easy to view your schedule and to-do’s side by side. If your to-do items have due dates, you can enable the Tasks calendar to view these directly in your schedule. The flexibility of gcal makes it the ideal tools for also implementing time management techniques such as time-blocking or tracking habits and goals . You can switch between various calendars, making it easy to focus on one area of your studies at a time. If you enjoy being able to have a curated and visually pleasing schedule, you can customise your gcal in a variety of ways , and enable different settings for your liking . 

MyStudyLife (Android and IOS App) ‍

MyStudyLife is a planner app designed for the intricacies of academic life, allowing you to keep track of classes, exams, and tasks. You can use their scheduling features to manage your academic calendar and keep note of your classes, deadlines, and holidays. This app understands how the academic year works and makes it easy to pause classes if it’s holiday time, and manage your studies as they change per term. The to-do list feature is also tailored to your academic needs, allowing you to assign tasks as an ‘assignment’, ‘revision’ or ‘reminder’. You can track your progress on to-do list items, making it intuitive to account for assignments that require multiple sessions. To bring things together, there’s overview and reminder features that give you your to-do list and schedule at a glance, and send you notifications so you never forget what’s coming up next. 

Owaves (IOS App, Android App Coming Soon) ‍

Owaves is a holistic calendar that encourages a focus on wellness using eight categories: love, move, work, eat, sleep, relax, play and flow. It’s important to find the balance between academic life and self-care to avoid burnout, and Owaves makes this easy to prioritise within your day. In the app, your time can be visualised as a circle, where you make time for each category of items. You can implement routines and schedules that make it easier to plan ahead. Using their homescreen widget, you see a circle of time for the task you’re supposed to be working on, and which task is coming up next. There’s even the ability to track your progress in each category, making it easier to reflect on all areas of life. This visual approach allows you to plan your ideal day, making time for wellness, love, and play while getting things done in a way that is structured and well scheduled. 

Tools for Time Management 

Session (IOS App) ‍

Session is a timer app that allows you to time your activities and track your progress. You can manually log how much time you spend on a particular activity, and view at a glance how much time you have dedicated to each. This is ideal for tracking time spent across modules, or long term focuses, such as exams or a dissertation. You can view each activity, and a history of your sessions using their simple interface. Sessions are an ideal way to log progress towards your goals, and reflect on how much time you dedicate to each activity or goal. This is perfect if you have a busy schedule, and prefer to work with flexible timing. You can work without a strict routine but still have enough information and insight to reflect on your progress. 

Flipd (Android and IOS App) ‍

Flipd is a time tracking app that encourages a community of productivity by allowing you to work in live public study rooms. You can set customisable timers for solo or group tasks, which are organisable using tags and colours. Timers can also be allocated to specific goals, and you can track your progress using your stats across days, weeks, and months, alongside achieving milestone badges. Flipd makes it easier to hold yourself accountable, or share accountability with others through public and private study groups. If you struggle with motivation for your studies, this is an ideal tool for feeling part of a community, and working towards your goals.

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How To Study: The Essay Memorisation Framework

Table of contents.

As a medical student, I did have to undertake some exams that required writing essays. One of the questions I often get asked is how you can apply techniques such as active recall and spaced repetition – that I frequently discuss as being ‘the best’ revision techniques – to essay-based subjects. During my third year at university, I adopted the following approach to preparing for my own essay-based psychology exams – it proved highly effective in my own exams and I hope that you can make effective use of it too.

The system can be broadly broken down into two stages:

• The Creation Stage
• Objective to create first class essay plans for every conceivable essay title that they throw at us in the exam.

2.  The Memorisation Stage

• Objective of committing all of these essay plans to memory by systematically using active recall, spaced repetition, spider diagrams and flashcards.

The idea is that, by using these two stages, by the time the exams arrive you’ll have memorised so many essay plans that they will either come up in the exam or the essays will be similar enough that you will have the knowledge to draw up and form coherent and well-structured essay that answer the question effectively.

Creation Stage

There are three main questions in the creation stage:

How to decide what essay titles to pick/prepare

The objective here is to ‘scope the subject’ and find essay titles that cover the entire breadth of the syllabus. The easiest way to do this is to both look through the past papers and start by planning the essays that have come up in the past and then examine the syllabus and identify areas that lend themselves to essays. Once you’ve planned out those essays, you’ll have a better idea as to what style of questions are asked and what material is often covered. This should give you a breadth of essays titles that span the course – if you find that there is still an area of the syllabus that hasn’t been address, try to come up a suitable question and add it to your essay plans to compile.

How you plan the essay

Personally, I would give myself one day per essay plan. Although it’s best to try to have this process ongoing throughout the year, I did the bulk of my essay plan preparation in the Easter holidays (perhaps not ideal!).

My process involved starting off with a question then use Google to get as much information as possible about that particular topic. I would start off with Google because it can give you a good broad overview as well as useful links to review papers that would often provide key details or interesting examples.

Once I had created my essay plan I would then look at the lecture notes and the recommended reading. This meant that a lot of my material was more original than everyone else’s because most other people would’ve built their essays based around the lecture notes, whereas I was building my essays from a Google search supplemented by lecture notes.

Once I had got my research document, I would spend a few hours writing out the essay – consolidating all the information into this one essay that I am ultimately going to learn.

How you make sure your essay plan is really good.

But how do we make an essay plan good? There are 3 key ingredients in my opinions:

• Answering the question
• Adding a bit of spice.

The introduction is the most important part of the essay because you can address all three of these key ingredients and signal to the examiner how you are going to go about compiling the essay and answer the question.

Here is an example of one of the introductions from an essay that I prepared on whether judgement and decision making is cognitive (logical) or affective (emotional).

The historical view in the social sciences has always been that judgements are based solely on content information, with individuals being assumed to form judgements by systematically evaluating all available content information in an unbiased manner. However, over the past three decades a considerable amount of research has challenged this assumption by showing that judgments may be formed not only on the basis of content information (cognitive judgements) but also on the basis of feelings (affective judgement). It is now well accepted that judgement can be both affective and cognitive. Whether it is one or the other depends on a multitude of factors: (1) the salience of the affective feelings, (2) the representativeness of the affective feelings for the target, (3) the relevance of the feelings for the judgement, (4) the evaluative malleability of the judgement and (5) the level of processing intensity. I will discuss these in turn and ultimately argue that generally speaking in day-to-day life, the circumstances are generally those that result in affective rather than cognitive judgements and decision making.

As you can see, I signpost the essay explicitly using numbered points as well as answering the question and outlining to the examiner the direction that my argument is going to go.

The Memorisation Stage

By this point, you should have a good number of essay plans that you’ve created in documents – now the aim is to ‘upload’ those essay plans to our brain. I approached doing this using three main techniques:

Anki Flashcards

With my essays, I used Anki flashcards to memorise paragraphs and main points whether from an essay or key points from a particularly relevant research paper. The aim was to create blocks of content with every Anki flashcard being its’ own ‘block’ which I could then draw upon either for the essays that I had planned or for unfamiliar essays but ones which I could answer using the material from the flashcards.

However, specific paragraphs or points from research papers aren’t helpful unless you can associate them with particular essays – that’s where spider diagrams come into the equation…

Spider Diagrams

Having memorised content blocks from my essays using Anki flashcards, I made one page diagrams of every single essay. The idea being that you would be able to discern the structure of the essay through the spider diagram as well as notice key words that are relevant for that topic and/or that you find particularly helpful in triggering your memory about the key points that you need to raise in answering that question.

Every day I would draw out various spider diagrams from memory and if there were any books that I didn’t know, I would look them up in the master research document or in Anki and actively work on learning those parts.

Over time, this became a highly effective way to systematically use active recall to ensure that I knew absolutely everything.

Retrospective Revision Timetable

The final part of the system involved systematic spaced repetition. If you’ve seen any of my other content, I am a big proponent of retrospective revision timetables. This approach counters the conventional idea of planning a prospective revision timetable which has a number of issues – namely trying to predict the future and inflexibility, amongst others – and instead involves creating a spreadsheet that starts with a list of subjects, topics or essays that we have compiled through scoping our subject and then inputting the dates on which we study those areas as well as colour code the system to provide a visual representation as to which areas we might need to cover again. You can read more about these sorts of timetables here , where I explain them in more depth.

This structure which combines active recall, spaced repetition, flashcards and spider diagrams was probably the most effective system that I used whilst at university. In the exam, about two thirds of the essays that we had to write, I had already planned. Although the other four essays that I had to write were ‘new’, I had built up such a systematic and in-depth knowledge of the subject that I could more easily draw upon ‘blocks’ of content from my Anki decks which I could then ‘drop’ into these essays to answer them effectively.

I hope this has provided you with a more logical structure with which to utilise active recall, spaced repetition, spider diagrams and flashcards to ensure that you can approach your essay-based exams with more confidence.

Please see the other blog posts in this ‘How To Study’ series for more hints, tips and guidance on studying and revising.

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The Essay Memorization Technique

There are two stages to this method:

• The creation stage : the objective is to generate high quality essay plans for every possible title that you could receive in an exam.
• The memorization stage : transfer all of these essay plans to memory by methodically using active recall, spaced repetition, spider diagrams, and flashcards.

Benefits of this technique : you will be able to memorize so many essay plans by the time your exam is due, that a lot of these will come up at the exam anyway (or similar ones, so you'll have the possibility to compile bits of the memorized information to generate great essays from scratch).

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The essay memorization stage.

The objective of this stage is to transfer all your essay plans into your brain so that you can use them later during the exam .

Useful techniques:

• ANKI flashcards
• Spider diagrams
• A retrospective revision timetable.

Spider Diagrams

• Using the memorized content blocks of the ANKI flashcards, you can build spider diagrams.
• You have the whole structure of the essay and the keyword in your diagram .
• Follow the same process for all your essay title. Put a date on ...

Essay Memorization: The Creation Stage

There are aspects questions to keep in mind at this stage:

• How you decide what essay titles to choose and prepare .
• How you plan the essays .
• How you make sure your essay plans are high quality.

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Title: recite, reconstruct, recollect: memorization in lms as a multifaceted phenomenon.

Abstract: Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it to the model and corpus. To build intuition around these factors, we break memorization down into a taxonomy: recitation of highly duplicated sequences, reconstruction of inherently predictable sequences, and recollection of sequences that are neither. We demonstrate the usefulness of our taxonomy by using it to construct a predictive model for memorization. By analyzing dependencies and inspecting the weights of the predictive model, we find that different factors influence the likelihood of memorization differently depending on the taxonomic category.

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