 Test prep pain and review revulsion cost many students marks. Fear and anxiety seems to drive the test preparation process for many students. Let me diagram this for you. At the beginning of the term, in week one, students don't do any test preparation. Week two passes and still they're not doing anything. Week three, week four, week five. Oh, they're going to class, they're reading chapters, they're doing assignments, but no actual test preparation is occurring. They're not reviewing material, they're not looking for knowledge gaps. As they start to become aware that the exam is approaching, their anxiety starts to rise, but not enough yet to cause studying, so they continue to do nothing. Anxiety continues to rise and rise until a threshold of tolerance is passed. They just can't take the anxiety anymore and they start to study for that exam. Perhaps the student is lucky and there's just enough time to complete the preparation for that exam. Usually not. If the student had built in the review process throughout the academic year, this would have solved this problem, but there is a twist. When you do that review matters greatly. Using a very simplified version of the forgetting curve, let me demonstrate this for you. If I were to plot out knowledge and effort, these two things are together because knowledge and memory come only with effort. Against time, you get the forgetting curve. After a student has read chapter one, their memory of that material fades with time, but it never completely disappears. They always keep some of it. If they never review, they have to spend considerable effort to recapture this faded knowledge before the exam. The more times they review, the more that they retain, and the less work before the exam. However, if they were to review that material earlier, they would get the same benefit of the review, the less upfront effort. The longer they wait, the more effort needed to refresh that memory trace. You have probably already experienced this effect. If you've just finished reading chapter one, and you were to test yourself with some questions on chapter one, you'd probably be able to answer them fairly quickly. However, if you waited 12 weeks, you'd probably find that you couldn't answer any of those questions. Your memory of that material had faded. This window of opportunity for low pain and high gain is 24 hours after you first learned the material, not the night before the exam. The forgetting curve is also applicable during exam week. If you start your review too late, you won't have enough time to complete the review. If you start too early, you might find that the memory starts to fade just before the exam. Usually, there's not enough time to compress all of the material into a 24-hour window, so you may want to do a long review before your final review. Let me show you how you might do this. Use a timeline or calendar and count backwards from the exam date the number of days that you need. First, give yourself one day for intensive review right before the exam. Then put in your long review. If you don't know how long you need for the long review, don't rely on feelings. Tally up the number of chapters or weeks of material you have and estimate how long for each. Assign the days accordingly. Keep in mind your daily limit of single subjects studying. Most students can't handle more than five straight hours of the same subject without decreased performance or slipping into a coma. Even before the long review, you may want to identify any knowledge gaps that you might have. It's not uncommon for students to find that they've missed, skipped, or skimmed through very important material that they need to recapture or relearn before the exam. So give yourself some time in your preparation plan to fill in these knowledge gaps. And of course, put time in to review your knowledge gaps as well. The way we have shown this, the actual time to begin formal term end preparation is two weeks before the exam. Not at all what your anxiety meter might have said. Of course, if you're watching this the night before your exam, you might not have found this all that helpful. Let me give you some suggestions. One, watch out for caffeine. Caffeine increases your stress and anxiety response. Two, you might want to avoid your panicky friends because stress is contagious. Three, don't have anyone test you hours before the exam. They can almost always come up with a stumper that's going to undermine your confidence. Four, don't trade sleep for more study time, especially in calculation type courses. Finally, relax. Schedule some anti-stress activities throughout your exam period. I hope this helps. Good luck.