I went to school for a long time - seven years (well, a long time for a guy who has a couple of undergraduate degrees) and I learned a lot about studying.

Here are some of the things I learned to do to study for an exam.

Play memory games
This is a good game to play if you are studying for a humanities or arts course where you have to keep track of who wrote what or who came up with a certain theory or what characters were from what books.

For one English exam I studied for, I wrote down the name of all the characters for all the books I had read for the year and the titles of the books. I kept one list whole and cut the other up so that each character and title was on one strip of paper. Then I spread the titles out on my floor and placed each character in a pile under that title.

The same trick can be used with matching dates with events or authors and works or creators and inventions or scientists and theories.

I figure that I had to run through the process two or three times to get everything down cold.

Explain the material to someone else
I found that if I had to explain a concept or storyline to someone else out loud, it really helped me to remember what I was talking about. The key was to find someone else who hadn't studied as hard as I had or was having more difficulty than I was with the material. You can't think you know all the answers that way, which was a trap that I fell into a couple of times when I was studying by myself.

Plus, if you're a know-it-all egomaniac like I am, you'll be motivated to stay up really late before your study sessions to make sure that you sound competent. Being afraid of looking stupid is very good motivation.

Rewrite your notes
They're probably pretty messy anyway, right? And don't just copy them down - read the concept and then try to put it another way as you rewrite the notes. You can do the same thing with textbook material.

Go to all your classes
It used to boggle my mind that people in university or college used to skip classes. I mean, you're paying for it! Anyway, I learned pretty fast that what my instructors would talk about would end up on the final exam. Go figure.

Stop studying the night before
This is something I used to do most of the time. The night before an exam, I would stop studying for it. I usually had a cut-off point of about 7 p.m. I figured that if I didn't know my stuff by then, I wasn't going to figure it out. So I'd close the books and maybe watch the news, read a book for fun or talk to some friends. The next day, I'd wake up, bring my 10 pens, watch, pencil, eraser and student card with me to the exam room and write the exam. I did not indulge in the pre-exam panic and boasting my classmates did. Also, once the exam was over, I put it behind me. I didn't rush home to check if I got a certain answer right. After I got the exam back, I'd look at it to see what I did wrong, if I could. But that was it. Panic does not help in a test situation.

Do practice tests
I maybe did this a couple of times, but I think it's worthwhile to try this out, especially if the instructor posts old tests online or makes them available in the library for students to practice with. Even if the questions are not the same as the ones you'll encounter when doing the real test, it gets you in the proper mindset.

Here's a good story that's probably an urban (or academic) legend. An instructor mentions in a class one day that he has put a practice exam in the library for the students to use to get ready for the final exam. Only one student bothers to go to the library to use the practice exam. When he (or she) goes to write the real exam, he finds that the exam is almost exactly the same as the practice exam and so aces it.

What some of the EDge staff recommend for study tips (names withheld to protect the weird. Bathtub?)

1. "This is funny but I used to study in the bathtub. It's the only place where no one could bug me and I couldn't be distracted. I would also read my notes out loud. That helped me remember."
2. "I used to write everything over again on paper and then I could store it in my memory longer and it also made me think about what I was writing at the same time."
3. "From what I experienced, I think the method, the attitude and schedule are very important, but most important thing is to be persistent."
4. "Make notes on the key points of each section of what you're studying - I would recommend that one page of notes would suffice for 10 pages of reading material - this provides a condensed version of what you are trying to recall for your test. Make up a song, a poem or a rhyme to remember groups of thoughts or specific numbers or formulas. Dehydration causes memory loss and poor concentration. Drink lots of water and get lots of sleep!"
5. "Prepare an outline of the major sections you want to cover. (That's the GOAL.) Within each section, identify key areas. (That's the mini-goal.)"
6. "Generally I would collect all the notes for the period that the test was going to cover, including my own notes and any readings - usually photocopied so everything could be butterfly clipped together and therefore be mobile. I then went through the 'study file' and highlighted the important parts. This made it easier to review. I made special note of any concepts I had difficulty with, or that I thought were most likely to be covered in the test. This is all done several days before the test. Then I went through this file, on a daily basis, in hour-long sessions. I might do two sessions a day for two or more days. I'd spend more time on difficult concepts if I felt I hadn't grasped the concept well enough. During the day I would mentally review the notes. I carried them with me so that I could verify things on the go."
7. "Reading aloud, writing summaries of the notes I'd taken throughout the year, making TIMELINES. But I'm a terrible studier."

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