Ferris forensic biology junior Eileen Nelson has come to understand the importance of nals preparation.
According to Nelson, she used to stay up the night before and cram for her tests, but after realizing it wasn’t helping her grades, she decided to change her approach on how to take her finals.
“Finals week is cumulative, and you can always go back and start preparing for what’s to come. For things that maybe you haven’t seen in months, I would start doing that right now. I wouldn’t wait the week before or day of, or whatever the case may be,” Nelson said.
Her own mistake has taught her the valuable lesson that sleep is a student’s friend when it comes to finals week.
“Staying up all night and studying for tests doesn’t help you do any better — I promise you that. If you get a longer night sleep and are more awake and prepared in the morning, you’ll do better than if you spent all night cramming for the test the next day,” Nelson said.
The British Journal of Medicine and Medical Research found that students who slept at least six to 10 hours within 24 hours before an exam received higher exam scores compared to those who slept fewer hours, according to sciencedomain.org. Since changing her study habits, Nelson has found studying to be more manageable, primarily by focusing on planning her weeks out in advance.
“I think setting goals is really important, and I think writing it down and saying, ‘I’m going to get this done today,’ and checking it off is helpful to see it in front of you,” Nelson said.
Other students nd that their issues with studying don’t lie within sleep — although getting enough sleep is essential — but in the assignments themselves.
For Ferris graphic design freshman Lauren Honama, her moment of hindsight came during finals preparation for a previous art history course she took.
We had to write an essay, and she was like, ‘It’s going to be on one of these five topics, but I’m only going to let you do one.’ So, I ended up thinking it was for sure going to be this one piece and I memorized it, but it ended up being one that I looked at for not even 30 minutes. So, I was like, ‘Oh,’” Honama said.
However, sometimes mistakes made in studying and finals week are nothing more than the cause of many performance malfunctions: test anxiety.
“I get like test anxiety so when I don’t learn the information right away, or I don’t take notes right away, I’ll like, second-guess myself on a test and think I won’t do that well. I worry until I get my test grade back. It’s just not comfortable,” Ferris pre-radiography sophomore Kelsey Harrigan said.
For all of these issues, mayoclinic.org recommends a few common solutions: eat plenty of food, avoid sugary drinks, focus on exercise and get plenty of sleep.