Turn your notes into a practice quiz

It's natural to think of a quiz as something you take after studying, to see how you did. But answering questions is itself one of the most effective ways to learn. In well-known experiments by Roediger and Karpicke, students who practiced recalling a passage remembered more of it days later than students who spent the same time re-reading.

So don't wait until you feel ready. Quiz yourself early and often, and treat wrong answers as the most useful part of the session.

Each question type trains something slightly different:

A correct answer can hide a lucky guess or shaky reasoning. Reading the explanation confirms why the answer is right and why the others are wrong, which is often exactly what the next, slightly different question will test.

Pay most attention to mistakes you were confident about. Research on the “hypercorrection effect” suggests that high-confidence errors, once corrected with feedback, tend to be remembered well — but only if you actually read the correction.

Before a lecture or reading, a short quiz primes you to notice the answers. Right after, it shows what didn't stick. A few days later, it's spaced retrieval. In the week before the exam, mix topics in one quiz — switching between topics (interleaving) is harder, but it trains you to recognize which idea a question is really about, just like on the real exam.