As finals season approaches, students scramble to cram four months of knowledge into one or two nights. Some lock themselves in their rooms and read the textbook until dawn, while others conglomerate in study groups in the hopes of learning from their peers. The more the merrier, right?
Well, not exactly.
Group study can have many benefits. It gives students the opportunity to discuss topics, share knowledge, ask questions and bounce ideas off of one another. Groups can be a great way to affirm that each component of the curriculum has been reviewed, and none forgotten. Furthermore, studying in groups can help ease pre-test anxiety and during finals’ season when there isn’t a lot of time for socializing, it’s a strategic way to get in time with your friends while still doing the work that needs to be done.
The issue is, as many students know, that the point of a study group is to study, and usually, not a whole lot of this happens.
Students get all their notes together, load up their backpack with textbooks, print out review sheets, and head to Bread Co. to meet their friends feeling like the most prepared, organized student to walk the halls of P-Central thus far. Unfortunately, the glory stops there.
We get to Bread Co. and find ourselves distracted in a whirl of M&M cookies (comfort food is a must), complaints and fears for the test and pointless small talk in the attempt to avoid the studying itself. Students who have been around the block a few times know this phenomenon very well; suddenly, three hours have passed and all that’s been accomplished is consuming several hundred calories and talking about studying, rather than actually studying.
While three hours is insignificant in the grand scheme of life, in crunch time it can very well mean the difference between a letter grade on the test, and for those borderliners out there, potentially in the class.
The key to finals studying is time management. During that dreadful week in December, drive through Chesterfield and dozens of bedroom lights can be seen turned on into the wee hours. In those moments, when students are downing 5-Hour Energy shots and prying their eyes open to read one last chapter, they swear to never “study” for three hours at Bread Co. with their classmates again.
Despite this truth, many students continue to make the same mistake repeatedly. The next day they take the test and, in a few days, check Infinite Campus only to be disappointed with the grade on the screen: “I stayed up all night, what more do you want from me?”
But by the time the next unit rolls around, students forget the vow they had made to themselves (probably because it had been made at 2 a.m.), and once again pack their bags and head to a study group.
Students continue to sacrifice the time and sleep required of a successful final exam, but aren’t seeing results. Proper studying takes more than the simple efforts of printing review sheets and organizing notes — you must complete the review sheets and read the notes too. Rather than being continuously disappointed by their test scores, students must reflect on the pros and cons of studying with peers. This may be different for each student, and even each study group. But if the cons outweigh the pros, students must change their studying techniques accordingly.
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then the large majority of our students are in need of an immediate psych consult.
If you’re looking to see a change in the grade book this finals season, try staying home and studying alone. You know yourself the best– what you need to study, how you study best, how long you need to study for, etc.
Let’s face it, nobody wants to spend eight straight hours in their room alone studying for a final on America in the early 1900’s, but nobody ever said finals season was supposed to be fun.
