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| Improving Study Habits |  If you are attending classes, you have probably experienced many moments when it was hard to make yourself settle down and study, even when an important exam was coming up. Most students put off studying until the very last minute. Therefore, the night before the exam, you'll stay up all night cramming, getting little or no sleep. And in the morning, you'll drag yourself out of bed, psych yourself up with lots of coffee and some cigarettes, and go into the exam feeling exhausted, drained and jittery all at the same time. At exam you'll find it hard to focus or think, and you'll be cursing yourself for not starting to study sooner.
It is not surprisingly, unless you are blessed with natural brilliance, or you happen to know the subject matter extremely well, you'll probably do terribly on the test. You already know it doesn't work, if this is your typical method of studying. And every time you go through this ritual, you tell yourself that you are going to smarten up the next time you face a big exam. As for next time, you'll start to study weeks in advance, you say. But again you keep repeating this crazy pattern. Why does this happen? What should you be doing instead if you want to get better marks?
A great problem for most people, especially those who are young students, is that life gets in the way. You probably have a part time job, if you are a student, and like most young people, you also want to have a social life. As most students you consider studying very boring compared to all the exciting temptations just outside your door or the games on your computer. For students, even watching old reruns of Sesame Street can seem more interesting than the biology text your teacher is expecting you to master!
One of the reasons we often don't start studying until the last possible minute is that we have misjudged how long it will actually take us to absorb and understand the material. If you have an exam in six weeks, it might seem like plenty of time left before you need to get around to studying. But you might find that the subject matter is a lot harder to understand than you thought it would be, and all of a sudden there's no time left to ask someone to explain it to you.
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