Secrets of a successful session: How to prepare for exams? Dear students, I know firsthand that the session period is a difficult time for most of you, especially for those who are about to receive an entry in the record book for the first time. For first-year students, the word “session” makes the heart beat faster, since they have never taken exams at a university and still have little idea how to behave, where to expect help or danger, and to what extent they can rely on their own strengths. For senior students, such feelings arise much less frequently and mainly before particularly difficult exams due to the complexity and large volume of memorized material or - the second option - due to the difficult character of the teacher. When both reasons are present at once, then you have to worry. However, in almost all cases, regardless of the length of student life, self-confidence before the exam increases when you manage to prepare for all or almost all questions. In this article, I want to give some tips and recommendations on how to prepare for exams easily and with pleasure, anticipating the joy of your confident and worthy answer and a bright “excellent” entry in your record book. First of all, my message is addressed to first-year students who are just about to master the exam preparation scheme, but I hope that experienced students, after reading this article, will be able to enrich their repertoire of techniques used to prepare for the exam. So, what are the main questions that students worry about when preparing for the exam? Usually, these are two questions: firstly, where to find the time and energy to study a huge number of questions, and secondly, how to make sure that everything is remembered for a long time. I answer the first question. It is impossible to study the entire subject three or four days before the exam, provided that you are hearing its name for the first time and have only attended one or two lectures. If you only realized this now, then the main thing is not to panic, but to draw conclusions for the future and properly organize your preparation in the remaining time in order to remember as much material as possible. So, the first step on the path to success is the correct organization of space and time! (No matter how banal it may sound). We prepare everything necessary for work in advance, laying it out on the desktop in a certain order. When you are constantly distracted by searching for a pen, paper, notes, you spend a lot of time and nerves, and the effectiveness of such work is minimal. An important point - put away or turn off your phone. If you are constantly distracted by your phone (or computer) and discussing who has answered how many questions, then there is no time left to study these issues. When you go online to find the answer to an exam question, keep that goal in mind. Otherwise, if you log in for ten minutes to look at the encyclopedia, and then sit on VKontakte or Odnoklassniki for two hours, then even with this approach it is difficult to expect a successful result. It’s better to leave the joys of the telephone and the Internet until the holidays, when you will communicate with friends with a sense of accomplishment, slowly and with pleasure. Next, I will talk in more detail about the correct organization of time. Rule 1: Use the “golden hours” for work: time from 8 to 12 pm and from 7 to 9 pm. It’s not for nothing that this time is called the “golden hours”, since it is during this period that your brain absorbs information better and easier. Perhaps senior students will object to me: “Nope, I always study at night and pass well.” I will answer that, of course, you can study at night and pass with a positive grade, but in this case, you are deceiving yourself. How? Firstly, you torment your body, forcing it to work for wear, and, thereby, cause harm to your health, which, if you abuse night training, can become quite noticeable and subsequently manifest itself in migraines, insomnia, psychosomatic diseases, and secondly, The quality of the material you remember suffers. Much nicer to work withduring the day during the “golden hours”, when the speed and quality of memorization is very high and you can relax with pleasure during the break. By the way, about breaks between working with the material. Rule 2: Breaks should be regular, but short, 10 - 15 minutes every 1.5-2 hours. This rule is very important. Breaks are necessary, the brain must rest and relax, but the frequency of breaks is important. You probably noticed that this period: 1.5 – 2 hours is the approximate frequency of couples at the institute. It was not invented by chance, since on average people can study productively for an hour and a half, and then they need time to rest. Use it, but in this case the duration of your “break” is very important; it should be the same as the change at the institute. If you increase its duration and rest not for fifteen minutes, but for an hour and fifteen minutes, for example, then when you finally force yourself to go to your textbooks, you will have to remember again for a long time, “enter” or, in scientific language, get used to what what you studied before the break. This also requires wasting valuable time. The fact is that the human brain is designed in such a way that it cannot, like a machine, quickly and automatically remember everything, and before any work, and preparing for an exam is work, it needs to get used to the activity. If you get carried away by the break and the processing stage drags on, try not to get angry, draw conclusions for the future and trust your brain, soon it will work at full capacity again. It is better to take a long two-hour break during the day - from 13 to 16 hours, when a decline in performance naturally occurs in our daily cycle. And the third rule: during the session, devote enough time to sleep! I know, friends, that you know this rule well, but you often neglect it, reasoning something like this: “Ah, now I’ll go for a walk, and I’ll learn everything in the last two nights. I’ll sleep well in retirement!” By thinking this way, you are forgetting the very important function of sleep. After all, we need it not only for relaxation. During sleep, the brain processes information. If you work with the material before going to bed, you will find in the morning that the information is structured much better, you remember everything and reproduce it easily. Sleep is a magical state that helps us not only relax, gain strength, but generally study well. So, to avoid the desire to commit suicide during the session, as in that saying about a student, follow these three simple rules, and you will you will have time for everything, you will be vigorous, cheerful and cheerful J. I answer the second question: how to make sure that everything is remembered for a long time? First of all, we need three basic principles of the structure and operation of human memory. Pattern 1: There are different types of memory. Depending on the duration of information storage, there are: short-term, operational and long-term types of memory. Information is stored in short-term memory for only a short time: from a few seconds to several minutes, and then it is forgotten. The main function of this memory block is to filter useful and unnecessary information. It includes and also quickly leaves information that is uninteresting to us, unnecessary, or that we remember with effort and not meaningfully, mechanically. RAM stores information from several minutes to several days. This memory block contains the information we need to solve some problem. For example, when we solve an arithmetic problem in our minds, before receiving the final answer, the intermediate results are stored in our minds (working memory), and after achieving the goal, they are quickly forgotten. The exact same story often happens when taking an exam. If your sole purpose for studying the material is to pass an exam, and you frantically study for it for several days and nights in a row, you may remember a lot of what you studied for the exam, but after passing it, 80% of the information will be lost. remembering which you spent a lot of time and effort will fly out ofyour memory. The power of the goal that a person sets for himself is very great. If you want to become a professional in your field and value your time, energy and health, find in the material what is interesting and useful to you, and set yourself a goal for long-term memorization. And then you will remember most of the information that you studied for the exam. And finally, the third type of memory is long-term memory, in which knowledge is stored for days, months, years or a lifetime. This block contains and stores for a long time the information we need, repeated and meaningful. Types of memory are also divided on another basis - according to the method of perceiving information. There are visual, auditory and motor memory. Everything is clear about visual and auditory memory, but motor memory works, for example, when we write down information. The second pattern of how our memory works is associated with this classification of types of memory. So, pattern 2. Information is better remembered if different types of memory are used simultaneously. For example, visual + auditory memory (this scheme works when you write plans for answering questions, notes, cheat sheets), or “three in one” - visual + auditory + motor (this is how you work when preparing in groups, while simultaneously listening to a classmate, reading notes and writing down the answer to the question). The latter method also allows you to practice reproducing the material and comprehend it more deeply. But this method is good for those of you who know that you can fight the temptation to often be distracted by drinking tea, watching movies and discussing extraneous topics. The “three in one” method can be very effective if you can organize yourself well. And finally, the third pattern is about the mechanism of forgetting. Unfortunately, our memory is designed in such a way that a significant part of the information is forgotten within half an hour after memorization. To be more precise, 40% of the information is forgotten almost immediately after memorizing, the next day – 34%, and a week later – 21%. Therefore, if after a two-hour break during the day, you feel that you have almost forgotten everything, do not get upset or angry. Just take a little time to look at the plan and review what you learned before the break. For good and lasting memorization of the material, it must be repeated regularly, and it must be repeated at the right time, namely the first time - immediately after memorizing, the second time - after about an hour, the third time - the next day and, finally, the fourth time - after a week or the day before the exam (make it a rule to always leave a day or half a day before the exam to review all the material). And then during the exam you will remember the answer to the question on the ticket easily and quickly. So, to ensure that the material you study is firmly stored in your memory before the exam, you need to follow a few simple recommendations. First, work with the material meaningfully, and not mechanically: make a plan of answers in the form of diagrams, drawings, tables, draw analogies with material already known to you. Second, set a goal for long-term memorization of the material. And finally, thirdly, repeat it regularly. Now, friends, let's move on to considering the methods, or step-by-step steps in preparing for the exam. The first technique I want to tell you about is the basic one, the majority of students use it, and the other two are auxiliary, they are good to use in addition to the basic one. Method 1 (basic). 1) Divide the entire volume of material by the number of days + one day to repeat all the material. We study the required number of questions per day; 2) We study lecture notes; 3) We carry out meaningful work with the textbook: we remember what is familiar from the lectures, what we are reading about for the first time. 4) We work with additional literature: in the form of abstracts we write down the author’s main ideas on the essence of the issue ;5) We draw up a plan for answering each question and reproduce the answer according to the plan;6) On the last day before the exam, we review all the material. Start!