Learning and going well in exams are two different things

You can hack your learning so that you are able to understand more content easily. This doesn’t mean that your grades will improve though.

Improving your grades in school requires you to go well in assessments. No secrets there, obviously.

But, you see, going well in assessments and exams needs a completely different set of skills to what it takes for good learning. One that is often thought to directly link to learning.

What I am about to say may burst your bubble a little, just giving you a heads up I suppose.

Learning your content is only a small fraction of what it takes to go well in an exam. Studying, this content is equally just as small a fraction.

You need to master different techniques to ace an exam than what you do to learn something. Understanding this key difference is what opened up my ability to improve my grades drastically in the last few months of my final year of school.

Before that, I was trying to learn everything in each of my textbooks because I thought that if I knew it all there would be no way I could possibly fail an exam.

By studying 30 hours a week and only focusing on learning all the content in the textbook that  would be tested in my next exam, I was actually dooming myself to failure. For so long I had been told that studying hard would get me good grades.

Lo and behold, it didn’t. I went from studying 30 hours a week and failing to studying less that 4 hours a week and ranking in the top 4% of the state.

Key secret, I spent less time ‘learning’ the content and more time practicing my exam technique.

I put myself through practice exam situations and narrowed my study to only look at what I needed to improve in for the exam situation. Most of the time it had little to do with “learn more stuff” and more to do with “get better at doing exams”.

The things I really needed to address were:

1) Managing my time in an exam situation – I couldn’t afford to run out of time with loads of questions unanswered
2) Making zero silly mistakes – I had no room to lose marks for questions I actually knew the answers to
3) Reading questions carefully – so I could provide an appropriate response and get maximum marks.

My study focused only on what I needed to go well in my exams and that’s it. I realised that, for me, the stuff I was learning in school only served one purpose at the time – to open up doors for me once high school was over. I didn’t need most of the information I was studying so hard for.

And even if I did, I figured that I could always google it anyway. There was no point force memorising bucketloads of information that really wasn’t going to be of use once the exams were over.

I also quickly realised that I wasn’t aiming for 100% in every exam that I was taking. I worked out the results that I needed and tailored my study to achieve these specific results. And no more.

For example, I didn’t care about sequences and series relating to finances when I was in high school – and I still don’t. So, I didn’t bother investing a stack of my limited time and energy into learning them just so I could answer the few questions relating to them in the exam. I let this be one of the topics that I was happy to flunk.

I chose which topics I would purposely flunk. This let me ace the rest of them and achieve the marks I decided I wanted to achieve.

By understanding this key difference between what it takes to learn and what it takes to go well in an exam, you too can hack your studies and start improving your results.