How to Study Less and Get Higher Grades 🚀

Hey y’all,

It’s been a while since we’ve last talked! Apologies for the silence these past few weeks—I was busy over at Next Admit wrapping EA season. Thanks to everyone who purchased a college essay review and best of luck to those who’ve applied early somewhere!

(And if you’d like our team of Ivy League consultants to review your college essay, you can submit it here.)

Alright, let’s get back into the swing of things by talking about one of your favorite topics: how to study less and get higher grades.

This newsletter won’t be some magic bullet that drastically reduces your study time. Rather, I’ll outline strategies and principles that can make your study sessions a bit more efficient.

Lets get started

Forget the Hours

My first tip is to disconnect yourself from the number of hours that you study. Many students fixate on the amount of time they study rather than how you study.

And I get it—it's very hard to measure the effectiveness of a study session. A metric like time spent is a concrete measure, though it often just masks the nature of the study session.

For example, let's say you study for five hours. Did you spend most of those five hours simply rereading and highlighting your notes?

Or did you spend those five hours quizzing yourself, tackling your weakest concepts first?

Read Backwards

This tip is valuable if you're short on time before an exam.

Instead of reading an entire chapter from start to finish, start from the end of the chapter. Look at the chapter summary to grasp a high-level understanding and then go back to the start.

Now, I want you to flip through the chapter, looking at all the headings, charts, and bolded terms. Along the way, read the first and last paragraphs of each section while skimming the middle ones.

I only recommend this strategy in scenarios when you truly need it. While this technique a great way to gain an overarching understanding of a chapter, overusing it is a surefire way to weaken your comprehension.

Batch Your Tasks

A major issue that many students deal with is context switching.

This term refers to the friction we feel when moving from one type of task to another. For example, when we jump from reading to writing or from math homework to history homework. It usually takes some time to “warm up” to the new task.

As such, to cut down your studying time, you must minimize the transitions, which you can do through batching.

The premise of batching is simple: you're going to group similar tasks and tackle them together.

For example, instead of doing math problems, then a history essay, then some science problems, and then an English essay, you're going to do the math and science problems first and then do the two essays.

This way you have one mental transitions instead of three.

Give Yourself Constraints

One of the easiest ways to spend less time studying is to give yourself less time to study. And no, I'm not being facetious.

There's an old adage called Parkinson's Law that goes as follows: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

In other words, however much time you give yourself to do a task is however much time you're going to take.

For example, if you give yourself three days to write an essay, you're going to take the full three days. But if you only give yourself three hours, you might be surprised to see how fast you can finish that essay.

Don’t set unrealistic deadlines, of course, but the point here is to not give yourself too much leeway.

Don’t Idle

As you're taking an exam or doing an assignment, you are going to come across questions that completely stump you.

The best thing that you can do in this scenario is to swallow your ego and move on. Trust me, I know how tough it is to abandon a question after you’ve invested a solid few minutes. But this is an example of the sunk cost fallacy.

Just because you've invested plenty of time into a problem (that's going nowhere) does not mean that you need to waste even more time.

In most cases, you're better off tackling other problems first and returning to the ones that stumped you.

What did you think about this newsletter? DM me on Instagram (@goharsguide) to let me know!

If you want study help, come join my Discord! We have a global community of students helping each other succeed in school. I’d love to see you there.

And if you need help with college essays, check out Next Admit! We have a team of Ivy League consultants eager to help you navigate the admissions process.

I’ll see you next week!

Best,
Gohar