 Today's video is brought to you by Picmonic. Have you ever taken a test or quiz just to see the results and go, wait, actually don't answer that. For 99.9% of us, the answer is absolutely yes. But in today's episode I want to talk about, once you do get a bad grade how to overcome it and make sure you crush it on your next quiz or test, let's get into it. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician. In here on the MD journey, we make content to help people like you succeed on whatever journey you're on, but doing it with less stress. And arguably one of the most stressful situations is after putting hours of studying for a stressful exam and not getting the results you want. In addition to overall feeling crappy, the next kind of overwhelming feeling is what the hell should I do next? I work so hard, didn't get the results that I wanted, how and what changes should I make? This is exactly what we'll talk about in today's episode. So step number one is to identify your specific flaws. Now whenever I'm working with a student one-on-one, although I like to say that every person who works with me gets amazing results after their first quiz or test, that's not always the case. And sometimes we'll have a student who does really well and then they'll come back and say, ah, I had a 90 before and now I have a 75. I'm so demoralized. But once we get past the pity party, the next questions that I ask them are the same things that I'll ask you. First thing is, was the information that was on the slides, was that discussed in lecture, was that included in your slides or your syllabus material? Question number two is, did you review that info during the prep? If you saw it on the slides, was it actually something that you went over? Question number three is, while taking the test itself, how did you feel? Did you feel confident or could you tell that that test and the grade that you wanted was slipping away? And so again, was the information present for you? Did you actually get a chance to review it? And how confident did you feel when you got tested on it? Now going through those three questions, that the answers to the first one is no, that information wasn't present on the slides, my syllabus, and I didn't hear the lecture talk about it. That is a perfect example of bad luck, where despite putting in the hard work and maybe having a right study system for yourself, you just happened to run across a question the professor asked that they didn't cover or definitely didn't cover well enough for you to do well on. And so in that situation, there really is only one option, appeal the damn score. Just kidding, you let your classmates do that. In the meantime, you take the L, you shrug your shoulders, and you focus on those questions that you did miss, that you said yes, that it was information that was presented in the lecture that I happened to miss. If the answer is yes, then you go to question number two, which is, did you actually get a chance to review that information? Now the answer is no, that means how you're gathering information from your slides or lectures, your syllabus needs to improve so that way in the future, you're not like, shoot. That was on page 39, bottom left corner, I knew it, didn't write it down, didn't have a chance to review it, avoid those mistakes in the future. Now the answer to the question is, is this something you did review and you tell me yes, then that means to how you review your information also needs to adjust, and we'll talk about that shortly. And then finally question three is, how did you feel while taking the test itself? Did you feel confident? Did you already kind of know you're going to get a bad grade? But the answer is, I felt uncomfortable. That also means that your review process needs to happen better and more frequently. We'll touch down the second. But the answer is, I felt pretty confident. The grade just didn't work out. Then you just have to essentially evaluate why you missed the question. Is it because of lack of an action where you thought something was correct and happened not to be? That still means that your review process has to improve, or is this something where you just made a mistake? And again, just like answer number one, or the professor didn't cover something and put it on the test, just take the L and appeal the score. So with all two hooking aside, let's actually talk about how to make those changes for your future quizzes and tests. You can actually get better grades. Now, as we already talked about, one of the most common reasons somebody can have a bad quiz or test score is that there's something covered in the material, but they just don't do a good enough job of gathering the information, whether it's from the syllabus, the slides, or the lecture itself. And so you have to ask yourself, what is the process that I'm using to gather information? Like how do I gather information while I'm in lecture or reading the syllabus? And most importantly, how effective is it? How useful is it? If you're saying not so much, then you have to rethink of how you take notes essentially to gather the information so you can come back in the future and ideally review them. If you don't have a really good system, definitely recommend checking out this episode or this video on how to use the Q&E or the Q&A method on how to appropriately take notes. Oh, it's super, super, super easy to come back and say, I can quickly review this and easily identify what I know and don't know. So after you watch this episode, make sure you go to that one. And on a similar note, the way you gather information may actually be difficult because the lectures or the material may just be too confusing or too overwhelming. So for example, when you're in medical school, it's very hard to say, what the hell is high yield? I just simply do not know. And so one of the best things that you can do for yourself is to stack your information that you learned from class with a high yield resource. Now, it's a great time to bring up today's sponsor, which is Picmonic. Now, if you're a honey medical journey, if you haven't heard of Picmonic, Picmonic is a resource for anyone on their medical journey who just wants an all-in-one resource to make the learning process of medicine super simple. With hundreds and hundreds of videos of really any topic, whether it be microbiology, anatomy, and embryo, path, hematology, you can essentially say, this is what I'm learning. And if you're learning, let's just say endocrine, and you know your lecturers don't do a good enough job of explaining something like physiology, which is very complicated, but also very important, you can watch something like metabolic homeostasis or calcium homeostasis. This is probably something I need as a doctor, to be quite honest. And then find the related videos in Picmonic for that relevant topic. So if you go through a lecture and saying, I just don't understand that really well, then you can come back to Picmonic after class before you do your note review and go into those relevant videos. Now, the cool thing about Picmonic is they're one of the first resources in the medical community to combine very interesting images and stories and so you can essentially go through this video, have different structures and images from their videos be identified with high yield information for that relevant topic. The other thing I really like is that their videos are just generally very short. This video right here is two minutes and 35 seconds. I can quickly watch it, get the story, get the high yielding material, and even still have time to quiz myself on what different images meant and how that relates to this topic being hypercalcemia. And with tons of other features, such as being able to use playlist, so as I'm going through a class, I can simply add all the videos that I've watched this far or plan to watch for a specific class and make sure I try to get through those before my quizzes and tests, Picmonic is a great resource for anyone on their medical journey. And so if you're on your medical journey and you're looking for an all-in-one resource that can make the learning and retention and quizzing portion super simple and effective, I highly recommend checking out Picmonic. If you use the link down below in the description and use the code, the MD journey at checkout, our friends at Picmonic have nicely included extra 20% off for all of our listeners and viewers. And so as always, thank you to Picmonic for being today's sponsor. Now once you improve your information gathering phase where you're improving your note taking or using a high yield resource to help you identify what's high yield, if you're still somebody who says I had that in my notes, I just didn't do a good enough job of reviewing it, then let's now talk about how to improve your overall retention with an effective review strategy. And one of the most effective things that you can do to help review process go more effectively is to simply give yourself more time to actually do it, but not by using more hours by simply taking the time from your information gathering phase where you're taking notes and watching high yield material and instead diverting more of those hours in time to doing the actual review process. And if you're interested in learning one of my favorite review strategies that is both effective, super simple and quick, definitely consider checking out this episode on how to use Anki like pro, not only do I break down the basics of it, but also advanced strategies are able to cut my setting from 10 to 5 hours in medical school. And after watching that episode, even if you don't use Anki, you can start to already see how somebody who is an effective learner transitions a majority of their time to doing reviewing, so then ideally they have more repetition of material and don't have that situation when saying shoot. Like I remember, this was in the right corner of this page, I just don't remember the information, giving yourself more repetition of something by simply dedicating more hours to it allows you to overcome those and then you can go to test it and saying I pretty much have seen something multiple times, I feel pretty confident that I'll get it right. Now, if you're interested in learning some of our other study techniques, definitely consider checking out a link down below to our free three steps study rehab course that basically breaks down how to improve your study, how to guarantee yourself more free time and how to include a study system where you're always covering your basis, so your score is always going higher. That is absolutely free. It's the same kind of technique that some of our students have used in the span of just a few days to get better grades. So I'll link that down below. Now, once you decide on how you're going to gather information, how you're going to review your information, the last step of the equation is for somebody who says, I've done my information gathering, I've done the review, but still when I go to test it, dang, my confidence is just not quite there, what should I do? And so for that student, in addition to recommending doing more repetitions to improve their confidence, I also recommend including free recall sessions throughout their week. Now, a free recall session is exactly what it sounds like, where the majority of your studying is typically, here's a question, do you know the answer? Yes or no? A free recall session essentially says, I remember the flow of a typical lecture. Let's see if I can recreate it out loud on a whiteboard, on a piece of paper, to my peers. And when you're doing these activities, you want to ask yourself, like, where do you stop talking if you're talking out loud? Or if you're riding on a whiteboard, where do you go from point A and simply just don't know what B is to be able to make it to point C? Where are those information gaps where you thought you knew something, but as soon as you put yourself to the test, by doing it out on a very active format, you're like, shoot, I can't remember that. And one of my favorite strategies for free recall that I actually recommended on my very first video on YouTube, terrible video on audio quality, so apologies, but still great content, I'll link it down below, is called the brain tone. It's a very effective technique to add to your repetitions of your review system to say, not only can I answer a question in fact individually, but without any type of prompt, I can essentially recreate an entire lecture from memory, identify what I suck at, fill in those gaps, do it all over again, and then when you go into test day, now you know, okay, I've gathered a majority of the information better than I did before, I've reviewed it more often and better than I did before, and I've improved my free recall. All of those together, guys, goes from a student who is like getting failing marks to C's on their test to somebody who's getting B's and A's, and most importantly, of how you make improvement from a quiz to quiz, despite your results. And so to close off this episode, a few reminders on what to do when you get a bad grade. Number one is to remember that you need to focus on backspacing and not doing control-alt-delete, because this is definitely a computer metaphor, but all of us have used control-A-delete where we just take away an entire paragraph, et cetera, but for studying, you need to just do backspaces where you're just taking away small things that aren't working, fix them by adding new things or not adding anything at all and becoming more efficient, but you don't need to destroy your entire study system or machine, and often it becomes hard to figure out what's working and not working when, overall, you have a Frankenstein of a study strategy. Now, if you feel like you're there already where you're like, I don't know what to do with the study strategy, you fix it, and you want to help improving and creating your perfect personalized study approach, then definitely consider checking out or level up your studying program. It's six steps and essentially the same thing I did to go from 10 hours to 5 hours, identifying what I'm doing wrong, identifying what top students are doing better than I am, and how to combine all of that to become more efficient, to become more motivated, and to study more effectively like we talked about in today's episode, and do it personalized to me. That's exactly how I went from 10 hours to 5 hours and still be able to get at 3.9 GPA in medical school. So if you're interested and you're not getting the grades that you want in medical school or on any journey that you're on, definitely at least check out some of the results of the hundreds of students who have gone through the program themselves. And as a final parole and reminder of what to do when a grade doesn't go your way is to refocus on what is actually within your sense or your locus of control, especially if you're somebody who's answering a question and we're like, I missed 10 questions, Luxe, but five of those are things that weren't covered in the lecture and the professor barely talked about. That is just something that you have to take shrug your shoulder, take the L, or appeal the test, and basically say this was not within my sense of control. So even if I worked harder, it wouldn't have really changed my results. So always remember that the test result doesn't relate to your sense of control. You could easily have taken one version of the test where all the test questions were designated accordingly to your strengths and you could have done really well on. But the professor could have easily decided to switch a few questions here and there and you could have gone from an A to a B to even a C just because of the questions that are asked. That's not necessarily your control, but how you're using the system and answering those questions that we talked about throughout this episode is really what's important. You can go through a series of tests and you'll be able to get B's and A's, but if you get one C, you're going to feel like that is a problem you need to fix entirely everything. If you go through those three questions that we asked, if the answer is that majority of those things were not in my control, then the simple thing is don't do anything. Continue to do the hard work you're doing, don't change the system very much, and then use the next test to actually evaluate what needs to be fixed and become more efficient. So hopefully guys, this step-by-step approach has helped you understand how to get past that crappy feeling and start to focus on how you can make improvements for your future quizzes and tests. It's the exact same approach I used for myself when I was in medical school, now the same thing that I used for my one-on-one coaching students, as well as students in our Level Up Your Setting program. Again, if you're interested, all those are linked down below, but all I ask is don't necessarily use the scores that you get on your test to reflect how smart you are. Sometimes you just have to change your approach. Hopefully this episode helped you do just that. And if you did like the video, if you felt you got some value out of it, all I ask is a form of thank you is just to hit that like button. It takes like half a second to go. It really helps YouTube to say some people like this video, I should show it to more people, and there's going to be somebody just like in your shoes that hasn't got the scores they wanted, and maybe the strategy helps them get their grades around. So to help your fellow classmates, to help your fellow colleagues, hit that like button if you did get some value out of it. If you've been learning, or if you're new to the community, definitely consider hitting that subscribe and notification bell to be notified or putting out videos like this twice a week. And if you're listening to this as a podcast on the TMJ show, definitely consider hitting that follow or subscribe on your favorite listing platform, as well as leaving an honest review on iTunes. But as always, my friends, if you guys have any questions, make sure you comment down below. If you made it to the end, you just want to say what's up, go ahead and comment down below, and I'll personally respond to your hello. As always, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully, I was a little helped to you guys on yours. If you did enjoy this video, check out this video right here on how to use Anki Like a Pro, as well as this video on how to use the Q&E method to take notes super, super effectively. But until then, my friends, I will see you guys in the next one. Peace.