The Night Before the Exam

It is eleven at night in a university library, and a student, Lena, has an exam at nine in the morning. She has a stack of notes: forty new words, twenty irregular verbs, a list of ten steps for a procedure, and four formulas. She has three hours before the library closes, and she is calm, because she has a plan. She will read it all again, three times.

She does. She reads the words and each one feels familiar. She reads the verbs and they look right. By one o'clock she has a warm, comfortable feeling that she knows it. She goes to bed pleased with herself.

At nine o'clock the exam begins, and the first question is a blank page. The words are not there. The verbs she thought she knew will not come out. She stares at a formula and cannot remember how it starts. It is the strangest feeling: everything looks familiar, but nothing comes when she asks for it.

What went wrong? Recognising is not recalling. When she read the notes, every word was in front of her, and the feeling of familiarity was strong. In the exam the notes were gone, and the memory had never been trained to come out on its own.

Psychologists have tested this many times. In one well-known series of experiments, students studied a short text and then either read it again or tried to recall it from memory. A week later, the students who had tested themselves remembered clearly more than those who had simply re-read, even though the re-readers felt more confident.

That is the lesson of this lesson, and the lesson of the whole library part. Words, verbs, steps and formulas all need the same treatment: understand, picture, place, test, and come back. You will practise all four kinds at once, as in the exam.