Ditch the Cram Sessions and Give Equal Love to Every Topic During the Semester

If you’re a law student, cram sessions might be a normal part of your study routine.  

It might go something like this. Try to keep up with the reading and outlining all semester. Use the week before finals to try and synthesize hundreds of pages of information.

But that makes my brain hurt.  Open to another way? 

The goal is to do well enough on exams so you can graduate, right? So, let’s reverse engineer it.   

You do well on exams when you write the topics simply. 

To do that, you must practice writing each topic.   

To be able to do that, you must understand how to apply every topic.  

To be able to do that, you must create an approach for each topic that mirrors how you’ll write it on the exam.   

To be able to do that, you must create and pull from one document that stores all the information about each topic you read, briefed, outlined, and learned in class.  

To be able do that, you must deconstruct your syllabus to understand the topics you’re about to learn in the class.   

Now you're at square one.  

Imagine if you did these steps for every topic the moment you got your syllabus. You’d be actively preparing for the final exam throughout the semester as you complete each topic.   

Each topic would receive the same amount of love. No playing roulette to decide which topics you have enough time to prepare for the final.  No relying on luck to get you to the goal of graduating.   

The best part? 

You avoid the cram session. 

You use the study week before finals for its intended purpose--to simply memorize the topic approach you created when you finished learning and writing each topic.

Boom.  

You're far too brilliant to rely on luck. And it's heartbreaking to see super capable students throw that talent away to rely on chance.