Why you shouldn’t cram for tests at school, in a nutshell

To cram or not to cram, that is the question… 

By Aaron Zhao

It’s 12AM, and he has a cup of coffee next to his pile of chemistry notes. Eyes ablazed, heart pumping, his eyes flicker back and forth between the dozens of formulas, trying to remember what each variable meant as a restlessness fills his body. A few houses down, she doing the same thing, but now it’s 3AM in the morning. Her pen flies across her physics homework as her mind is set upon fire by the abstractedness of quantum mechanics. Before their head touches the pillow and their fingers the nightlamp, they both think about how they are not as confident for tomorrow’s test as they imagined themselves to be.

This is a reality for highschool students. This is a reality for university students. Perhaps, even some elementary school students are guilty of it. Cramming is the study strategy of packing as much information into short-term memory, to maximize test performance. In most cases, it requires pulling all-nighters, leading to a lack of sleep.

Naturally (as may of us have learnt through experience), the absorption rate of information is very high, but it comes with a cost: a high forgettance rate. The two fictional characters described above probably won’t remember much of the chemistry or physics notes that they crammed into heir head, a month later. This is because the overload of information remains in the short-term memory, but rarely becomes long-term. Hence, forgetting everything learnt is not uncommon for test-crammers.

The downsides of cramming

There’s a few problems with this study strategy. First, it completely ruins the concept of grade school. Each subsequent grade (8, 9, 10, 11, 12) is building on top of the previous year’s information, so if the final exam of a course is crammed and the test-taker immediately forgets all that they learn, how will that prepare them for the following year? Furthermore, research reveals that pulling all-nighters has a significant impact on memory. According to Professor David Earnest of Texas A&M College of Medicine, brain efficiency decreases with every hour of sleep lost. Lack of concentration, apathy, and decreased attention are typical symptoms of a day following an all-nighter of cramming.

What you should do instead

Intuitively, learning gradually and over a long period of time generally yields better results. This is the “Spacing Effect”. One study assigned 36 early-elementary students to three different groups. The first group was taught all four science lessons on Monday, the second group two lessons each day on Monday and Tuesday, and the third group was taught a lesson each day from Monday to Thursday.

To not much surprise, the third group’s performance was the highest, for both simple and complex generalization questions. Evidently, spacing out studying is the optimal study method.

So, what should you do now?

Stop procrastinating. It may be easier said than done, but procrastinating is one of the two most common reasons why cramming happens. The other reason is being unable to balance all the school work. More information on procrastination will be posted later in this series. For now, awareness is the first step. Good luck, students.