Two Simple Yet Effective Strategies to Help You Learn Faster And Forget Less
There is a lot to learn for the GMAT, in terms of both content and skills, and most people are preparing under a deadline. To compound matters, as time passes, it’s easy to forget some of what you’ve learned. So, I’ll go over two simple yet effective strategies to help you learn more, learn faster, and forget less while preparing for the GMAT.
Strategy #1: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition To Improve Your GMAT Preparation
Humans learn through exposure and repetition, so the more time you spend with a GMAT topic and the more often you study it, the better versed in that topic you’ll become and the better you’ll remember it. Therefore, as you prepare, it’s important to regularly re-expose yourself to previously learned GMAT material.
For example, if you learn about number properties on day one of your prep, it would not be wise to wait until day 60 to again review number properties. Instead, spend some time reviewing number properties on day three, day eight, and so on.
When you expose yourself to a topic over and over, you’re basically telling your brain, “Hey, this stuff is important!” You reactivate neural pathways to that part of the brain where the information is stored (and weaken competing pathways), making the information more easily accessible. That neural reactivation is a key to retaining previously learned material and keeping it fresh.
Keep this fact in mind: your brain is not designed to remember everything. In fact, it’s not designed to remember most things. Can you imagine how overwhelming it would be to remember everything you saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt each day? Furthermore, can you imagine how much energy it would require to remember all those details? So, by design, your brain remembers only the important stuff. But you must teach it what is important, and one way to do that is to study a topic multiple times, over multiple sittings, thereby making that topic memorable.
Strategy #2: Using Spaced-Repetition to Accelerate Your GMAT Study
It turns out that we learn more effectively when we give our brains a little time to forget what we just learned and then review and/or recall the material at a point in the near future. This process is referred to as “spaced-repetition,” and it has been shown to improve learning considerably.
Let’s use the topic of units digit patterns as an example. Study units digit patterns for a preset time, say, one hour. Then, after the hour, move on to a new topic, for example, subject verb agreement. Continue to move through a few dissimilar GMAT topics during that study session. Over the course of a day or so, you’ll start to forget some things that you learned about units digit patterns. Now is the perfect time to restudy that topic. Sit down for a study session and work again on units digit patterns.
You’ll find that you more quickly and easily attain the same level of competence that you attained in your earlier session. In fact, you’ll probably get some new insights that you didn’t get in your previous session, as you add to your knowledge base. You can continue to use spaced-repetition throughout the course of your preparation. You could study units digit patterns five, six, or even seven different times, utilizing the process of spaced-repetition to enhance your learning.
Happy Studying!
