You leave one of your tasks aside, thinking that you can just do it later. A week has passed and you still haven’t completed it, believing that there’s still a lot of time left. That night, you decide to check the deadline and are left in an utter panic when you are met with the words “Due 11:59 P.M.” At once, you try completing it as fast as you can, hoping and praying that you’ll meet the deadline. Sounds familiar? Well, this is when the “very strategic” plan students resort to when faced with this scenario, also known as cramming, is executed.
All kidding aside, cramming is one of the most prevalent issues students face. At times, it is due to the negligence of requirements or the mismanagement of time. However, there are undeniably those times when we are so flooded with assignments, performance tasks, and tests that we get lost in our own to-do lists. In those instances, we tend to focus on certain obligations over others, lose track of their deadlines, and end up doing them last minute. There are also situations where students choose to cram-study for tests because they believe they can learn more or work faster under pressure. Though it may be effective at times, cramming can leave different sorts of negative effects on us, including higher stress and anxiety levels which make it harder for us to process information. For instance, if you forgot to study for a test and just started reviewing the lesson the night before or on the day itself, you’ll only be able to keep a fragment of what you go over. While taking the test, bits of your notes’ contents may start to leave you as panic begins to rush. As you read a question, perhaps you recall that it was mentioned somewhere in the teacher’s slides, but only end up frustrated at not being able to remember the right answer. This is without a doubt something that we don’t want to happen.
Given that cramming uses our short-term memory to store information, it is possible to gain high scores on tests even if you forced the entire lesson on yourself the night before. However, that does not make it any better or give us reasons to put off our requirements. Studies have shown that the timing of our studies matters. Due to the time constraints involved with cramming, it doesn’t allow us to entirely comprehend what we’re reviewing, keeping us from our full potential. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, discovered a good way for us to retain and recall information instead of cramming. This method is known as the “spacing effect.” As the name suggests, the spacing effect involves spacing out your studies over time. Instead of using our short-term memory, we can instead have information kept in our long-term memory. Scientists like Ebbinghaus have discovered that to counter our forgetting nature, we can revisit pieces of information at intervals. Since we get to review concepts at a proper rate, our knowledge of the subject is built up over time and our minds are able to retain the information better.
Though cramming may seem like a good option at times, do know that it isn’t. It’s not worth the risk to our time, sleep, and overall health. Instead of just waiting for the deadline, it would be better to accomplish tasks as soon as we can so that we won’t need to worry about them later on. Delegating tasks and creating study plans can go a long way in our academic journeys. We all struggle to find the proper balance between our many extracurriculars and our ever-growing schoolwork. However, with wise and proper planning, we can all succeed. It just takes one step at a time.