In this article, I will be covering everything related to why you forget everything before an exam and what is the actual fix for it. This particular thing happens to a lot of students and nobody really talks about why it is happening. So if you want to actually retain what you study and stop panicking the night before your 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 a lot of students go through this particular cycle every single time and it is honestly one of the most frustrating things you can go through. You study for weeks and weeks and then you sit down the night before the exam and it feels like your brain just decided to go on a vacation and take all your notes with it. In addition, a lot of people have reported that the harder they try to remember something in that moment, the more blank their mind gets. The reason is simple, your brain is not broken, you are just using the wrong study method and then expecting a different result from it.
Before we go deep into what actually causes this and how to fix it let me also say that I will be writing a separate article on active recall and spaced repetition in detail which are the two big weapons here. So stay tune and subscribe to the blog if you want that one as well because honestly those two topics deserve their own space you know.
In this article I won't be teaching you memory science in full depth which I have already done that in a separate article. So do check that one out but later on. The main focus over here is this particular problem of blanking out before exams and why it is happening and what you can actually do about it. Okay?
So the first thing you need to understand is what is called passive studying and this is honestly the root of the entire problem. Passive studying is when you read your notes and it feels like you are learning but your brain is actually not storing anything in long term memory and it is just kind of floating in your short term memory for a while. I remember this one time I sat for four hours reading the same chapter over and over again — actually I had highlighted almost every single line by the end of it and the page looked fully yellow — and then the next morning I could not remember the name of the concept from that chapter. Not even the name. Four hours and nothing stuck. This particular experience is probably something a lot of you can relate to.
The reason this happens is because your brain learns by doing, not by watching and reading. So since your brain works on a use it or lose it principle so if you are not actively retrieving information, you are not actually learning it. You are just giving yourself the feeling of learning which feels productive but is not productive at all and that is a really dangerous place to be in especially when you have a competitive exam coming up like GATE or any government exam on that level.
Now the second reason this particular thing happens is something called the forgetting curve and this was actually figured out a really long time ago by a person named Ebbinghaus and the idea is that within 24 hours of learning something you forget about 70 percent of it if you do nothing with that information again. So since you are not revisiting at the right times so the information just dissolves. And this is not a you problem, this is not about intelligence or how good you are. This particular thing happens to everyone. The brain does not store what it does not see as important and if you read something once and never touch it again, the brain files it under "not important" and clears it out and that is just how it works.
So the fix. And this is where things actually get interesting. I generally use two approaches, first one is spaced repetition, second one is active recall and together they are honestly the most powerful combination you can use for any exam.
Spaced repetition is basically revisiting your material at specific increasing intervals and so instead of reading something once and moving on, you revisit it after one day, then after three days, then after a week, then after two weeks and so on. There are apps that do this for you automatically like Anki and it will schedule your revision cards based on how well you know each thing. It sounds simple and it kind of is but the consistency is what makes it work and a lot of students just skip this particular step and then wonder why they forget everything.
Active recall is the other half of it and this is where instead of re-reading your notes, you close them and try to write down or say out loud everything you remember. This particular method forces your brain to actually retrieve the information and that retrieval process is what actually builds the memory. So what I do is I just study a topic and then I close everything and I grab a blank sheet and try to write everything I just learned from scratch and — by the way the first time you do this it is a little bit uncomfortable because you realise how much less you know than you thought — whatever I cannot write down, that is the thing I go back and study again. It is really that simple.
This is the part a lot of people do not fully understand and it is worth spending a bit of time on. When you re-read your notes your brain is recognising the information and recognition feels like knowledge but it is not. Recognition and recall are two completely different things and recognition does not actually build the neural pathways that help you answer a question under exam pressure. Recall does. It is kind of like when you watch someone play a sport and you feel like you understand it and then you try to play it yourself and you realise that watching and doing are a completely different thing. Same idea over here.
So since students train their brain through recognition by re-reading so on exam day when the paper is in front of them and the notes are not there, the brain does not know what to do. It was never trained to retrieve, only to recognise. And that particular gap is what causes the blanking out and the panic and all that. The exam is testing recall and you practised recognition and those two are not the same thing.
Now let me explain the logic behind all of this. Why? Because the brain only builds strong long-term memory when it is forced to retrieve information from scratch. When you re-read notes you are not making your brain retrieve anything it is just processing what is right in front of you. But when you close the notes and force yourself to recall — even if you fail and have to check the answer — that particular struggle is actually what encodes the memory more deeply. The failure is the feature not the bug. So since active recall forces retrieval so it is the thing that actually builds real knowledge and not just familiarity and this is the reason why students who use this method consistently go into exams and actually remember what they studied.
Studying more hours with the wrong method is not the fix. Studying with the right method even for fewer hours is.
So friends, this was Why You Forget Everything Before an Exam (And How to Fix It for Good) — was this article helpful to you? Let me know which one you are going to start with, spaced repetition or active recall, in the comments section below. Till then, I'm signing off, So stay tuned and stay safe...😊