The Late-Summer Showdown
August is about to begin, and as summer comes to an end, a number of fast-approaching dates will prove momentous in the lives of thousands of university students. Perhaps the least stressful of these – though not to say inconsequential – will begin on the week of the 14th, during which those students who are enrolled in summer courses will write their finals. Shortly thereafter, a fresh crop of graduates and soon-to-be-graduates will be applying to a variety of graduate and professional schools, and will thus be writing such wonderful exams as the LSAT, MCAT, GRE, and GMAT. The pressure induced by these events could reasonably reduce even the mightiest scholar to a puddle of nervous sweat. This made even worse by the heat and consequent malaise brought about by the mid-summer weather. All considered, what we have this time of year is a large group of stressed-out students with important tests to write but little motivation to prepare for them. I personally count myself among these unfortunate souls. With the LSAT creeping up on me, I am slowly coming to realize that my entire future may very well be contingent on the results of a singular, half-day exam. Yikes… But I’m still committed, so I’ve spent the last few days looking into how I might improve my study habits so as to maximize my test performance, and I’d like to share what I learned with you here.
Image courtesy of Eberhard Grossgasteiger
It’s All About Incentives
Without having someone there to constantly push you, it’s hard to get yourself into the habit of studying every day. It’s even worse if you find yourself working a full-time job, as no one wants to sit down for three hours after a full work day to work even more on an even harder task. So the question becomes: how can I convince myself that the struggle is worth it? The answer – at least as far as the research shows – is to provide yourself with incentives. But what might those incentives be, and how can we best actualize them? Intuitively we all already know that the most obvious incentive is the A+ or the acceptance letter at the end of the tunnel, but in practice this on its own rarely gets us as motivated as we need to be. So the next step is to be practical with our incentive-making by starting at ground zero. What we need to do is make ourselves feel good not just about the reward, but also about the preparation process. But how might we do this? Here’s some of what the research tells us:
- Praise Over Punishment – success breeds success, and in numerous trials researchers have found that those students who receive praise for strong work are more likely to study longer and perform better later. Conversely, while those who are punished often produce better results in the short term, they tend to lose their motivation as the time horizon increases. And why wouldn’t that be the case? If you were cheered for every time you skated out onto the ice to place hockey, and booed every time you stepped onto the basketball court, which sport would you rather play? The key here isn’t to seek out validation wherever you can find it. Rather, it’s to celebrate your successes and not beat yourself up over your mistakes. If you write a practice exam and get only half the questions right, be happy that you got that half in the bag come exam time and take the other half with a grain of salt – it’ll come with time and practice. After all, if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t actually learning anything.
- Competition Is Good… Even If It’s With Yourself – there’s a reason that the prestige of something is generally dictated by how competitive its acquisition process is. When we have nothing to compare our performance with, we have no reason to push ourselves any further. Ergo, the more comparators – or competitors – we have, the more reason we have to improve the quality of our work. This point comes with one important caveat: while competing with your peers is by no means a bad thing, tying your self worth to your performance relative to them is not a fruitful exercise. Test scores come woefully devoid of context. You may have a peer who consistently scores higher than you on a particular test, but this on its own says remarkably little about your intelligence and value. Perhaps you work a full-time job while said peer can devote substantially more time towards their studies. Or maybe you wrote your test shortly after a tragic event which your peer was fortunate not to endure. This does not mean that you should simply stop competing per se, but rather that you should refrain from comparing yourself to who others are today in favour of who you were yesterday. For instance, if you scored a 160/180 on a practice LSAT yesterday, make 161 the standard to beat tomorrow, regardless of whether one of your peers scored a 170.
- Work In Increments – if your goal is study 4 hours per day, do not start right at 4 hours per day. This may sounds frustrating, and perhaps you believe that you can buck the trend and jump right into a rigorous study regimen. If you can, then you’ve probably already figured out how to get yourself motivated. If you can’t, then remember that these tips are about creating sustainable study habits. It is incredibly difficult to start a 4-hour-per-day habit, whether you are doing so over the span of one week or one year. The problem is that regardless of how strong you start, once you break the habit and only study 2 hours here or 1 hour there, it is incredibly easy to fall off the wagon. Numerous studies have shown that people learn better when they split big topics into increments and split them over several days. This pattern is even stronger when it is done right before bedtime. Most importantly, it requires very little manipulation of one’s schedule to start at 1 hour and slowly work their way up to 3. The easier you take it, and the more realistic you are, the easier it will be to get yourself into a steady routine.
Tying in the Incentive Structures
So now I’ve discussed three general, research-supported study principles, and you might be wondering how you can tie them all together into an effective study regiment. To be completely honest, the efficacy of these principles is largely determined by your relative comfortability with them. Nevertheless, here is an example of how I have applied them to my own study habits, and little bit of background regarding the highs and lows that I’ve faced in so doing:
- The Underlying Incentive is Always the Final Goal – It is important to frequently re-evaluate why you’re studying so rigorously. It is difficult to keep your energy up when you feel like you’re exhausting yourself for no reason. If you’re finding yourself chronically under-motivated, perhaps this is a sign that you’re taking the wrong path in life – and that’s okay! Don’t tie yourself to an anchor that’ll make you unhappy without good cause. Conversely, you may be under-motivated because the test score that you need is only a stepping stone to your real goal. This is certainly the case for me. I want to do well on the LSAT so that I can go to a great law school so that I can then work in environmental law and help save the planet. You’ll notice that there are two not-insignificant steps in between where I am at now, and where I want to be. But this also helps me frame my underlying incentive structure more accurately. If my study efforts will one day equate to better environmental outcomes, I have a far stronger incentive to study than I did when I was just trying to get a great score!
- Not Being Afraid to Reward Myself – The LSAT is hard. I often encounter questions which make me want to hit my head against a wall. It would be easy for me to reprimand myself every time this happened, and indeed, that is what I used to do. But when I was doing that, I constantly dreaded returning to my prep tests. When expressed in this fashion, it probably sounds ridiculous: I was scared to study because I didn’t want to be punished… by myself. Yet, almost all high-achievers do this, constantly! I’ve recently started to focus less on what I’ve gotten wrong, and more on what I’ve gotten right. Whenever I find a particularly difficult question and manage to get it correct, I give myself 15 minutes to read whatever book I’m in the middle of. I’m a busy guy, and often struggle to find the time to read, so by building such time into my study schedule, I’ve actually made it so that I look forward to studying. This isn’t to say that I’ve started ignoring the questions that I’ve gotten wrong. To the contrary, I’ve spent more time focusing on them, because I now want to turn them into correct questions, and thus give them twice the attention!
- Set Daily Goals, However Small They May Be – As any LSAT veteran will tell you, prep tests take a long time to complete. The test itself takes a whole half day. So trying to beat my overall highest score every single day is infeasible – aside from the obvious fact that I’ll eventually run out of prep tests! Hence, I’ve started setting small self-competition goals for each and every day, and I vary what their focus is from day to day. For example, on a Monday I might focus on finishing a Logical Reasoning section in less time then I did on the previous Wednesday. On the following Tuesday, I would then focus on finishing a Logic Games section with a better score than I had on the previous Thursday. These goals are small and manageable, yet still encapsulate a variety of the overarching aims that I must achieve prior to my actual test date. Most importantly, they entail that I’m constantly competing with someone, even if it’s just myself. The important part of this point is to ensure that I’m never studying aimlessly or without a plan, and that I’m always upping the intensity in increments to make sure that it is commensurate with the expectations of the actual test.
All of this probably sounds quite abstract and idealistic. After all, our starting point was that it’s mid-summer and for all my research, even I am struggling to stay motivated. But the first step of recapturing your energy is recognition and critical re-evaluation. The principles that I’ve outlined here constitute my own personal bout of recognition. And as I’ve said before, the efficacy of these incentives vary from person to person, and some of them may not work for you at all. But they are a start, and if you’re struggling to stay motivated then hopefully they’ve inspired you to re-evaluate how you might energize yourself!
How do you stay motivated when preparing for a big test? Do you disagree with any of my methods? Do you have any more of your own to add? If so, don’t be afraid to keep the conversation going by commenting below, or by tweeting us @UBCLearn!
