In this article, I will be covering everything related to why studying more hours can actually lower your exam scores. This particular thing is something a lot of students don't want to hear but honestly it is something they really need to know right now. So if you want to stop wasting your time and start getting better marks in your next exam then read this article till end.
Hello guys! What's up? My name is Prince Upadhyay and welcome to MegaMocks, your go-to place for exam prep tools and study strategies. So let's start with the topic...
So since exam season is always around the corner so there is always this pressure going around that you have to study more and more and more and if you are not studying 10 hours a day you are basically doing nothing. In addition, a lot of people have started believing that the number of hours you sit with your books is directly equal to how much you will score. The reason is simple, everyone around them is doing the same thing and no one is really questioning it. So they just follow along and at the end of the day they end up more confused and more tired then they used to be before they even started.
And honestly I have been there too. I remember one particular night before my exam and — actually this is a funny story because I had three cups of tea and I was reading the same paragraph over and over and it just was not going in — and I still sat there for another two hours thinking that sitting longer means studying more. It does not. I learned that the hard way. And a lot of students are still making this particular mistake every single day you know.
In this article I won't be going into the details of sleep science or how the brain consolidates memory in too much detail which I have already done that in this article. So do check this one out but later on.
Okay so let's get into the actual reason why this particular thing happens. When you study for a really long time, like 8 to 10 hours back to back, what happens is that your brain starts to enter a kind of — how do I put this — a state where it is processing but not really processing. And here is the thing, it is kind of like when you are reading a novel late at night and your eyes are going over every single word but you are not really understanding anything and you get to the bottom of the page and you have no idea what just happened. So the same thing happens when you overstudy and it is not a willpower problem it is just how the brain works honestly.
Now there is this particular thing called cognitive fatigue and a lot of people don't really talk about it but it is really important. So what happens is that the brain has a limited amount of glucose it can burn per session and after a certain point the neurons are not firing as efficiently as they should and the information you are putting in is just not being stored properly. And the really bad part about this particular thing is that you don't feel tired the same way you feel tired after a run you know. You feel kind of awake but foggy and that is actually a worse state to be studying in then if you were just sleepy.
And then there is the quality versus quantity thing which I feel is the most important point in this whole article. So a lot of students I have spoken to — and this is something I have seen a lot of people do over here in exam prep groups and forums and all that — they have this habit of going back and re-reading the same chapter they already understood just because they feel like they have to fill the hours. And re-reading is actually one of the least effective study methods there is. It gives you a false sense of familiarity because you are seeing the words again and it feels like you know it but when the question comes in a slightly different format you are completely blank. So since the brain got comfortable seeing the text so it never really encoded it deeply.
The problem also is that when you are mentally exhausted you start making really careless errors and — actually this is something that happens to GATE aspirants specifically because the questions are really tricky — when you are tired your brain starts taking shortcuts and you end up misreading the question or you miss one condition in the problem and your answer is completely off. And the sad thing is that this particular mistake is not a knowledge problem it is a fatigue problem and it is 100 percent avoidable.
I generally use 2 things to manage this, first one is a simple Pomodoro timer and second one is a plain notebook for tracking my daily topic coverage.
The Pomodoro timer helps me stay in 25 minute focused blocks and then I take a real break and in that break I am not on my phone reading memes or scrolling, I am actually getting up and walking or just sitting quietly for a bit.
The notebook helps me make sure that every session I am moving forward into new material or doing active recall and not just passively re-reading the same content I did yesterday.
Now let me explain the logic behind this. So the reason this particular approach works is that your brain actually consolidates information during rest and not during the study session itself. Why? Because during sleep and during breaks is when the hippocampus transfers information into long term memory and if you never give it that time and you just keep hammering more and more content into it then you are basically overwriting stuff before it had a chance to get stored and that is a really big deal especially when you are preparing for a competitive exam where every mark counts. So pushing for 10 hours with no real rest is not double the output of a 5 hour focused session it is actually less output overall and you are also damaging your next day's session because you will start fatigued.
The real flex is finishing your study goal in 4 focused hours and then shutting the books and trusting the process.
That particular thing takes more discipline then sitting for 10 hours because your brain will always tell you that you should do more. But more is not always better. Right in front of you is the data, the people who top these exams are not the ones who studied the most hours they are the ones who studied the most smartly and recovered properly.