Anas Nuur Ali is a YouTuber that specializes in how to study more effectively and pass your exams in flying colors. He is always breaking down the techniques he uses to study and will usually take you through a day in the life of studying. His videos are very fun to watch (in my nerdy opinion) and he gave me a ton of great tips on taking college exams and the CPA Exam. He’s studying to be a doctor in the UK and I was obviously studying to be a CPA but most of the concepts apply to both areas of knowledge. Below are notes I took on his video on how to Memorize FAST for Exams in 3 steps. Watch his video here. Enjoy my notes, his video, or both!

Everything you need to know for the exams is in the content taught in lectures

You will not specifically be tested on things that have not been taught in the lectures

The Strategy – 3 Steps

Accumulation: Take all of the content and put it into one folder on your computer. This may mean taking all of the content from PowerPoint form and put it in a simplified word document form

Create an organized folder for your semester and within that you have each class, and for each class you have each topic broken down. In this master folder you will have all of the content that the university wants you to know

Conceptual Understanding: This happens simultaneously with step 1. As you are organizing your notes into your folders and summarizing the content into that word document you are trying to understand it. Apply some critical thinking and ask yourself how the lectures are linked together.

Hopefully with this step you will have that light bulb moment where you feel all of the puzzle pieces are falling into place

Memorizing: Using active recall to fetch the information from your brain. This is what you are going to have to do on exams so you better practice it. This contrasts well with highlighting and reading notes because when you are highlighting and reading notes you aren’t fetching any information from your brain. It’s like going to the gym and watching another person run on the treadmill and expect that you are going to be able to run well on race day. That is simply impossible. You must exercise your mind the same way we exercise in the gym so that you are able to perform well on exam day.

Essential tools are flashcards or some way to test yourself. This is something I have written about which is turning a Google Sheet into a giant flashcard testing study ground. This is the most useful strategy for me. Read this article on Google Sheets (regulation for now) or watch this video from Ali Abdaal.