As most people are back to school and midterm season is rolling up if not upon us already, students are getting bogged down by exams. But how exactly can students go about handling university exams better and improving their results? Most students will find it challenging to keep up with consistent studying when involved in multiple extracurricular activities.

The culture shock experienced by students as they enter university involves adapting to campus life where professors, unlike high school teachers, do not hold students accountable for their work and attendance. This is where we see most students starting to skip classes, or showing up only to doze off during lectures.

While this freedom feels incredible at first, students will soon find this to be a stressful element of university. Self-discipline is required to keep grades on the line and to balance other aspects of their lives; this calls for sustainable study habits.

Although it may be hard to admit, most students don’t have the best study habits. Poor planning and last minute cramming sessions seem all too familiar to university students. Knowing that you cannot keep getting bogged down by last minute studying and stress, things need to change. The risk of dropping out of university without a degree is simply too high. If you’re currently a student, you don’t want this situation to occur after all the efforts.
Luckily for most of us, there’s some study strategies that can be well revised to adapt to your schedule. By doing so, you can now eliminate the need for cramming last minute, hence reducing exam stress in university.

This strategy can be broken down into four simple steps. Ideally, this is meant for courses that involve final exams of all material covered throughout the semester:

1. Start using a schedule system like Outlook, Google Calendar or just a simple agenda to plan a regular study session for each of your courses. Realistically you can have one for each course you’re taking during the week.
2. Don’t just schedule in study sessions, make sure you make them like your dates. There’s no opting out of them without there being a consequence later on. The alerts from your calendar will remind you of unfulfilled commitments.
3. During your study sessions, make sure you review everything you’ve covered that week and topics you struggled with previously as review for upcoming exams.
4. Continue to review all new and old content throughout the semester so that you won’t forget content that you haven’t used in a while.

By using this study strategy, you’ll find yourself quite familiar with the content of the course before the final exam without the stress to bog you down.