How to study the night before an exam

Start with a ten-minute plan

1. Write down what the exam covers, from the syllabus, past papers and anything the lecturer hinted at.
2. Mark each topic: I know it, I almost know it, or I haven't started.
3. Put them in order: the almost-known topics first, a quick check of the known ones second, and only the most likely of the unstarted ones last.
4. Pick a time to stop that still leaves you a full night's sleep, and plan backwards from it.

Topics you almost know give you the most marks per hour: a little practice turns them into answers you can write. A topic you've never opened rarely becomes exam-ready in an hour, unless it's small and almost certain to come up.

Test yourself, don't reread

Rereading on the last night is tempting because everything looks familiar, and familiar feels like known. But recognising a page isn't the same as being able to write it out. Testing yourself shows you the difference while there's still time to do something about it.

In a 2006 study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students either reread a passage or practised recalling it. Rereading did slightly better on a test five minutes later, but recall practice won clearly after two days and after a week. Your exam is somewhere in between, and testing has a second advantage tonight: it tells you exactly what to fix next.

• Past exam questions, answered closed-book, then checked against the mark scheme or your notes.
• Flashcards for the facts you must know cold: definitions, formulas, doses, cases.
• The blank page: write everything you remember about a topic, then check what you missed.
• Explaining a topic out loud without notes, as in the Feynman technique.

See active recall for why this works.

Why sleep beats an all-nighter

Sleep isn't time off from learning. A 2010 review by Susanne Diekelmann and Jan Born describes how the sleeping brain replays and stabilises what was learned during the day. In a 2006 study by Steffen Gais and colleagues, students who learned a list of English–German word pairs and slept soon afterwards remembered more of them than students who stayed awake for many hours after learning.

Losing a night's sleep also makes you worse at the exam itself, and you may not notice. In a 1997 study by June Pilcher and Amy Walters, students kept awake all night did worse on a reasoning test than students who slept, yet rated their own concentration and performance as better.

A 2019 study by Kana Okano and colleagues followed students in a university chemistry course who wore activity trackers through the term. Students who slept longer and more regularly got better grades. Sleep on the single night before a test wasn't linked to the score on its own; sleep in the week and month before was. Tonight's sleep still protects what you study this evening, but the bigger lesson is for next term.

What to skip tonight

• Brand-new topics that are unlikely to be examined.
• Making neat notes or rewriting summaries. It feels productive, but it's mostly copying.
• Highlighting, which helps very little even with plenty of time.
• Group chats comparing how much everyone hasn't done.
• Caffeine late in the evening if it keeps you awake.

The last hour before bed

Use it for a final pass on what you keep getting wrong: the hardest flashcards, the formulas that won't stick, the cases you mix up. Write those on one page. That page is your morning review.

Then pack what you need: ID, pens, a calculator if allowed, water, and the room and start time checked. Set two alarms. Then stop. Lying in bed scrolling through slides on your phone gives you very little learning and less sleep.

The morning of the exam

• Read your one-page list once or twice: definitions, formulas and the things you kept getting wrong.
• Don't start anything new. It mostly adds worry.
• Eat something and arrive early, so the first ten minutes of the exam aren't spent calming down.
• In the exam, read every question first, start with the ones you can answer, and come back to the rest.

Next time: start a little earlier

Cramming can carry you through tomorrow, but much of it fades within days, which hurts when the next course builds on this one. See cramming vs spaced repetition. A few minutes of spaced flashcards a day from the first week of term does more than a long night at the end, and it makes the night before an exam a calm review instead of a rescue. See how to study for exams for a four-week plan.

If you're starting tonight, FlashCardz turns your lecture PDFs into flashcards in seconds, each quoting the page it came from, so you spend the evening testing yourself instead of writing cards. Set your exam date and the reviews are planned around it. Turn a PDF into flashcards.