How to study effectively for exams

You've been studying for three hours. You've read your notes four times. You've highlighted the important bits in three different colors. You close your textbook feeling pretty confident.

Test day arrives. Your mind goes completely blank.

Sound familiar?

Here's the problem: your brain is lying to you.

When you reread your notes, they look familiar. You think "yeah, I know this." But familiarity isn't knowledge. Recognition isn't recall. And on exam day, nobody's going to show you the answer and ask if it looks right.

Most study advice focuses on tactics (make flashcards! use spaced repetition! study in 25-minute blocks!) without explaining the actual science of how your brain learns. So you end up cargo-culting techniques without understanding why they work or how to adapt them.

Let me break down what actually matters:

1. Active recall: your brain only remembers what it has to work for

Passive review is a trap. When you reread your notes, your brain goes "oh yeah, that looks familiar" and gives you a false sense of security. It's recognition, not retrieval.

Active recall forces your brain to pull information out of storage without prompts. That struggle - that moment of "wait, what was it..." - is what builds strong memory pathways.

What this looks like in practice:

• Close your textbook and write out everything you remember about the topic
• Get a blank piece of paper and recreate that diagram from memory
• Turn each heading in your notes into a question and answer it without looking The key is: no peeking. If you can't retrieve it now, you won't retrieve it on test day.

2. Immediate feedback: Correction only works when your brain is still warm

Getting something wrong isn't the problem. Staying wrong is.

Your brain is most plastic - most ready to rewire - in the moments right after you attempt something. That's when feedback matters. That's when correction sticks.

Wait until later? Too late. The wrong pattern is already encoded. Your brain has moved on.

This is why practice tests you take and forget about are useless. You need to:

• Check your answer immediately after attempting it
• Understand WHY you got it wrong, not just what the right answer is
• Reattempt it right then, while your brain is still in problem-solving mode Feedback delayed is feedback wasted.

3. Desirable difficulty: comfort is the enemy of learning

Here's the thing nobody wants to hear: studying should feel uncomfortable.

That feeling of "ugh, this is hard, I don't know this, I'm struggling" - that IS learning. That's your brain forming new connections. If studying feels easy and smooth, you're probably not learning much.

Educational psychologists call this "desirable difficulty." The friction is the feature.

What this means:

• Don't avoid the topics you find hard - that's where your study time should go
• If you're getting everything right, make it harder
• That "oh shit I got it wrong" feeling? Chase it. That's where growth happens The goal isn't to feel good about studying. It's to confront what you don't know while there's still time to fix it.

4. Multiple formats: your brain needs different angles

Reading about photosynthesis is different from drawing the cycle from memory is different from explaining it out loud is different from answering "what would happen if you removed X?"

Same content, different cognitive demands. Each format strengthens different pathways in your brain.

Build your study session around transformations:

• Read the material (input)
• Summarize it in your own words without looking (processing)
• Create questions from it (restructuring)
• Answer those questions later (retrieval)
• Explain it to someone else or out loud (synthesis) When you can take information and transform it into multiple formats, you actually understand it. When you can only parrot it back, you don't.

5. Metacognition: You need to know what you don't know

The most dangerous thing in studying is thinking you know something when you don't.

You need constant reality checks. You need ways to catch yourself being wrong before the exam does.

This is why self-testing is non-negotiable:

• You can't fix gaps you don't know exist
• "I feel like I know this" is not data
• Testing yourself reveals the holes Most people avoid self-testing because it feels bad to confront what they don't know. But that discomfort is the entire point. You're hunting for gaps while there's still time to fill them.

What this means for your actual study session

Stop highlighting. Stop rereading. Stop making pretty notes you'll never look at again.

Instead:

1. Read the material once
2. Close the book
3. Write out everything you remember
4. Check what you got wrong immediately
5. Reattempt those parts
6. Create questions from the material
7. Answer them (without looking) the next day
8. Explain it out loud to test if you can synthesize it It won't feel as satisfying as spending three hours making color-coded notes. But it actually works.

The uncomfortable truth

Real studying doesn't feel productive. It feels frustrating and difficult and like you're constantly discovering how much you don't know.

That's the point.

Most edtech makes studying feel good - points, streaks, progress bars, "great job!" messages. It optimizes for engagement, not learning. You finish a session feeling accomplished but you haven't actually learned anything.

Effective studying feels uncomfortable because you're constantly confronting gaps in your understanding. That discomfort is not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you're doing it right.

Your brain only grows when it struggles. So stop avoiding the struggle.

The Problem with all of this

Everything I just described works. It's also tedious as hell to do manually.

You need to:

• Generate your own questions from material
• Check if your answers are actually right (not just "close enough")
• Get immediate feedback while your brain is still engaged
• Do this consistently, not just the night before Most people don't. Not because they're lazy, but because the friction is real.

I built Lexie because I got tired of watching kids reread notes and call it studying. Take a photo of your material, get instant quizzes that expose what you don't know, get corrected immediately. No points, no streaks, no gamification theater - just the actual work of learning, with the tedious parts automated.

But whether you use Lexie or do it manually - the principles stay the same.

Test yourself constantly. Get feedback immediately. Chase the discomfort.