The fact that so many academic classrooms eventually come down to memory tests still seems to me to be an outdated concept. Surely how-well you can remember quotes from Hamlet says nothing about how well you’ve understood the text? Surely if you can analyse a text having not spent hours studying it that actually means your better, not worse, at that subject? Why should your eventually grade come down to an unrelated natural talent?

Fortunately though, despite memory having an element of natural ability, revising for exams (and revising in general) is an ability that can be improved with understanding and training.

Firstly, your success can be affected by the way you lay your notes out. Many articles will promote other formats, one popular method is the ‘memory map’ which allegedly mimics the neural networks in your brain (though surely this is more pop psychology than anything), it is ‘The Sheet Technique’ that I have found to work for me and that I will be discussing here.

The Sheet Technique essentially means cramming everything you need to know onto one sheet. The benefit of this is that you can then look in just one place in order to revise and test yourself and that you can carry it everywhere with you – thus revising while you’re eating or even seeing a man about a dog. It certainly feels more manageable in that format too. Furthermore, it’s not just having it on a sheet that’s helpful but the act of writing it out again and again.

So take your subject, let’s say sandwiches. First of all, read all your notes from throughout the year on sandwiches and summarise them as best you can across a few pages. Don’t write down anything you already know or ideas for essay answers – these are just the hard facts, the things you need to remember.

Now throughout the course of two or three more attempts you need to narrow this down more and more using shorter and shorter short hand to jog your memory without needing reams of writing. The aim here is to get it on one side of A4 paper so that you can simply look down and have all the knowledge in front of you.

Once you’ve got to this stage you should find that you’ve already absorbed a lot of facts and dates without even trying to. Now highlight the key dates and facts that you want to jump out at you and start testing yourself from the sheet. You can carry this everywhere and absently mindedly test yourself while doing other things. Now with just one sheet in hand it should take no more than a few hours of casual recital to learn everything you need to know. Now get a goodnight’s sleep – you’ll need it to cement your new information. Good luck!

Mack LeMouse

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