1. Whack more papers every day.

Doing a bit is better than spamming everything

2. Track progress and work on things you are weak at
3. Practise on papers that are similar to the finals/mid-terms
4. Dont go for any competition, have more slack time
5.

Physical + mental prep Time spent on mugging Strategy/mental model

Sleep is the effective Only counted when Change from fixed

form of studying 100% concentration mindset to growth
Exercise Pomodoro mindset
Healthy food Change ur topics Test to find concept
Managing stress Related it to gaps and work on it
Bulletproof coffee something that you and get A+
Repeat that I love know Bit-by-bit strategy
what I do and I love Walk around to spread out
working hard refresh urself and Refine/test ur mental
think model
Space retention Let some time to
(ignore correct, focus forget. Forgetting
on wrong) helps to rembering
Cornell notes Reverse
Study from multiple learning/enginnering
sources (whatever q u
Explain and justify to dunno, work
urself. backwards from
answer and
understand)
Do notes/update Mon-
Tues. Rest is practice
Q

Growth mindset
Aim: get more experience in applying and change more wrong to right
Make more mistakes and quickly adjust/gain more experience
Studying is about making the least mistakes means getting more experience in what you are
doing
Get experience by doing more papers and analyzing mistakes (each line by line) and update
mental model and track your progress

I WANT TO MAKE MORE MISTAKES

GET EXPERIENCE and fail forward. Do more correct than the other guy
Mistakes are $$. If I can find them early enough and correct them, my grades will go up. So I
want to make a mistake
1) Shallow learning
2) Deep learning
3) Awareness learning
Motivation
1) Clock sheet (hours clocked/clocked hours?/ Ma papers/ Tax papers/corp fin papers.
 Analytics
(everyday do 1-2 finals papers). Nearer to exams, spam 3-4
Do paper + refer to notes (reverse engineering) => concept gaps => revise and put into notes.
Revise notes and repeat
Dont base it on fear. Base It on reasoning. Justify why is it like that. Dont use emotions
https://howtostudyincollege.com/

Get a hobby, spend time everyday (balance yin and yang) so wont get inbalance

#1 predictor of results - # of test paper you do. Spam more. After mid-terms whack finals. Learn
by doing.

Working to Results Not Time Top students never sit down to do a certain time slot of work. They
sit down to get a certain amount of work done. Top students work to achieve a result, not to
clock up time. The amount of time they spend working is secondary to the amount of work they
get done. A top student therefore may do two hours of study, not because they thought that
would be a good amount of time, but because it took them 2 hours to complete the work they
had designated themselves. One of the most vital flaws in planning study is when students aim
for a certain amount of time instead of a certain amount of results. For example they may plan
to do 2 hours of English study however the 2 hours they spend may not amount to much at all.
Instead of planning for time, students who understand the concept of self-management plan for
results. Planning for results is different in that time should not be a major consideration. What
you should be doing is focusing all your energies into achieving a certain outcome. Instead of
sitting at your desk for 2 hours and doing unrelated study, planning for results forces you to take
actions that will be relevant and time effective. One example was a guy called Stav. Before Stav
started studying he used to write down what he wanted to achieve before the end of the day.
For example he may have written down: Take notes on section 1 in History text Complete
section 3 exercises for Maths and Do a practice essay for English. He found that by writing
down what had to be done it was easier to maintain focus and self-discipline, as he knew
exactly what had to be done. Once Stav had finished this list he would then put a number next
to each task designating the tasks importance. By following this process of prioritisation he
knew exactly what order he had to move through the tasks. The result was that Stav always got
the most important work completed first. Whenever you sit down, set a goal of what work you
want to complete and then put these tasks in an order of importance. Know that you are working
to complete that task and not to sit there for x number of hours.

TECHNIQUE 7: Hard Work

Implicit in working smart is working hard. Picture your Final Year like this; your goals
and your study techniques are the bricks, which make up a house. The hard work on
the other hand is the cement or mortar which pulls it all together and makes it a
strong and sturdy structure. There are no short cuts in the Final Year, in most cases
the mark you get corresponds to the work you put in. This chapter serves as a guide
to how hard the top students are working.
How Hard Are Some Students Willing to Work?

Most of the students we interviewed stated that they believed that the key factor in getting the
mark they wanted would not be intelligence but rather hard work. For them the key question
was, were they prepared to put in the time it would take to get a good mark? All of these
students knew that only by working hard could they have the level of preparation they would
need in an exam. This one belief, that hard work was central to success led students to put in
the long, hard hours of work. Read what one student said when he remembered his work ethic:
In Year 12 I started really becoming serious about my final year. I became so serious that I was
treating it like a job. I would keep a time sheet and pound out those good-for-nothing-hours like I
was being paid. I wanted to beat the amount of hours I logged on every week and would feel a
great sense of achievement every time I would tally up the hours in a day I had studied and saw
I had broken the 10 hour mark. One day I distinctly remember how chuffed I was when I rolled
up in bed noting that I had chalked up a fantastic 21 hour day.

Being Able to Rapidly Tailor and Reproduce Information In an exam all your marks come from
being able to put the information you know onto paper. You dont get marks for simply
memorising information. Because of this it is crucial that you master the process of sitting
exams and tailoring the information you know to an exam question. Given the fact that this is so
crucial it is an absolute mystery why so few students ever practice it. Too many students walk
into an exam room having only ever done a few practice papers.

The sheer volume of past papers that the top students go through is amazing. While an average
student may do 1 or 2 practice papers during the entire year, students we interviewed who got
98+ were doing on average 4-6 practice papers per subject for each exam.

each exam. 13 For a subject like Maths where you dont need to be learning notes it is all about
practice papers. Preferably you should be doing practice papers all the way through the year. By
the end of the year most students who got in the top percentile for Maths had done between 20-
30 past Maths papers. One student named Talia would actually do a Maths practice paper
every single day of the year!!! Often you may not be able to do all the paper because you
havent covered all the material in class. In this case break the paper into the sections which
you can do. Doing practice exams is absolutely crucial to doing well!

Class part compoment Project work EXAMs

-Do 3 questions to ask in
class. Ask 3 Q

1) Focus on 2 topics ahead

2) Spending only 1-3 days revising old
3) Rest move forward plus practice
Mr PRACTICE
Project not that impt. Spend time wisely
Buy notepad to track progress and weak areas.
e.g.

MA done? # of papers
Balancing scorecard ?/3

Weak areas

I consider myself a professional student/learner and believe that there are definitely techniques
that I learned that can also be used by others to improve their grades.

I offer the following advice based on my experience:

1. Write your notes in a way where you can test your retention and understanding. Many people
write notes that do a great job summarizing their materials but their notes are not designed to
promote learning, retention or diagnosis of their weaknesses. But my notes can -- and so can
yours.

Simply put my notes can be used like flashcards because I write them in a form where I
separate a "stimulus" from a "response." The stimulus are cues or questions (think: front side of
flashcard), while the response is the answer to the cue (think: back of flashcard). But the stimuli
are to the left of a margin, while the responses are to the right. The key advantage of this is that
just by putting a sheet of paper on top of your notes, you can hide the responses, while leaving
the stimuli visible. You can have multiple margins and multiple levels of stimuli and response for
greater information density. When you get good at this you can write notes in this form in real-
time. To get some idea of what I'm talking about google for "Cornell Notetaking method". My
notetaking method is a variant of this. I usually use completely blank paper to do this because
regular lined paper has too small a margin.

To give you an idea of how powerful this notetaking method can be, I learned several
courses just hours before the exam and still got an "A" in all of them during a difficult
semester where I had too many competing priorities to spend long hours studying. Had it
not been for this notetaking method I don't think that would be possible.

2. Develop the ability to become an active reader (this is the perhaps the most important advice
I have to share). Don't just passively read material you are given. But pose questions, develop
hypotheses and actively test them as you read through the material. I think the hypotheses are
part of what another poster referred to when he advised that you should develop a "mental
model" of whatever concept they are teaching you. But a mental model can be much more than
simple hypotheses. Sometimes the model resembles a story. Other times it looks more like a
diagram.

But what they all have in common is that the explain what is going on.

Having a mental model will give you the intuition and ability to answer a wider range of
questions than would be otherwise possible if you lacked such a mental model.

Where do you get this model? You creatively develop one as you are reading to try to explain
the facts as they are presented to you. It's like guessing how the plot of a movie, before it
unfolds.

Sometimes you have to guess the model based on scarce evidence. Sometimes it is handed to
you. If your model is a good one it should at least be able to explain what you are reading.

Having a model also allows you to make predictions which can then be used to identify if your
model is wrong. This allows you to be hypersensitive to disconfirming evidence that can quickly
identify if your model is wrong.

Oftentimes you may have two or more models that can explain the evidence, so your task will
be to quickly formulate questions that can prove one model while disconfirming the others. To
save yourself time, I suggest focusing on raising questions that could confirm/disprove the
mostly likely model while disproving the others (think: differential diagnoses in medicine).
But once you have such a model that (i) explains the evidence and (ii) passes all the
disconfirming tests you can throw at it then you have something you can interpolate and
extrapolate from to answer far more than was initially explained to you.

Such models also make retention easier because you only need to remember the model as
opposed to the endless array of facts it explains. But perhaps more importantly, such models
give you intuition.

Of course, your model could be wrong, but that is why you actively test it as you are reading,
and adjust as necessary. Think of this process as the scientific method being applied by you, to
try to discover the truth as best you can.

Sometimes you will still be left with contradictions that even your best models cannot explain. I
often found speaking to the professor after class to be a time efficient of resolving these
contradictions.

I discovered mental modelling as a survival mechanism to pass my studies at the University of

Waterloo -- where their teaching philosophy is misnomer because their teaching philosophy is to
not teach as well as they could.

You can see this from their grading philosophy. Although they don't use a bell curve or other
statistical grade adjustment, they make their exams so hard that the class average is usually
between 68 (C+) and 72 (B-) in spite of the fact that their minimum admission grades are among
the highest in Canada (you need more than A+ to get into several of their engineering
programs).

The only way they can achieve such low test averages from otherwise high performing students
is by holding back some of what they know, and then testing what they didn't explain well in
lecture on their exams; or by not teaching to the best of their ability.

This forces students to develop the ability to teach themselves, often from materials that do not
explain things well, or lack the introductory background knowledge needed to understand the
material.

I realized I could defend against such tactics by reverse engineering the results into theories
that would produce those same results; i.e. mental model induced from scarce facts.

Then when I got to MIT I found myself in a place with the opposite teaching philosophy. Unlike
Waterloo, if the whole class got an "A" the MIT professors would be happy and proud (whereas
at Waterloo an "A" class average would be the cause for a professor's reprimand).
The mental modelling skills I developed at Waterloo definitely came in handy at graduate school
because they enabled me to learn rapidly with scarce information.

3. Be of service to your fellow classmates. I've personally observed and heard anecdotal stories
that many students in highly competitive programs are reluctant to share what they know with
their peers; a good example being the vast number of students in a top ranked science
programs competing for the very few coveted spots in med school. I've seen people in such
situations be afraid to share what they know because the fear it could lead to the other students
"getting ahead" while leaving them behind. I would actually recommend doing the opposite:
share liberally. You can't expect help from others if you are unwilling to help others yourself.

I spent hours tutoring people in subjects I was strong in. But, conversely those same people
were usually happy to help me with my weaknesses when I needed it. I also found it easier to
get good teammates -- which is essential to getting good grades in team-based classes. I found
I learned a LOT from other people. And their questions helped me to prepare for questions I
may not have thought of -- some of which would appear on the exams.

4. Understand how the professor grades. Like the real world, the academic world is not always
fair. You need to understand who is grading you and what they are looking for. Oddly, if you
actually answer questions as written, you won't get full marks from some teachers. Some
professors expected more than the answer. Some only accepted the answers taught in class as
opposed to other factually correct answers -- which coincidentally can easily happen if you rely
heavily on mental models. Some expected you to not even evaluate whether the answers to
their multiple choice answers were true or not; only to notice which answer choices aligned or
did not align with the theories taught in class. Some highly value participation in which case you
ought to have a mental model of what they are teaching based on their assigned readings. The
sooner you know who you are dealing with, the sooner you can adjust to their way of grading.
Thankfully I considered the vast majority of my professors to have graded in a fair manner.

5. Get involved in research while still in undergrad. Academics is a means to an end. To me that
end was "solving problems" and "building stuff" specifically systems and organizations.
Depending on the school you apply for, your research may be just as important, if not more
important, than your grades. In fact if all you have are good grades your chances of getting into
a top ranked CS program with a research component (e.g. MIT, CMU) are slim to nil; though you
might still be able to get into a top-ranked courseware-based Masters (such as Stanford where
there is no masters thesis).

I did an Artificial Intelligence research project in undergrad and posted it on the internet. Not
long after it was cited in three patents from IBM, AOL and another inventor. Then 40 other
people cited my work. I feel this helped me get into MIT because they saw that I could come up
with theories with practical applications. It also led to internships with top research teams whose
work I am still in awe of. This research also helped my graduate application. None of this would
have been possible if I didn't do research in undergrad.

6. Attend classes. I do not understand the students who claim they did well without attending
class. Many professors will only say certain things in class. Many classes only present some of
the material in class. If you don't attend class you simply won't get that material. You also won't
be able to ask immediate follow-up questions. I also found speaking to the professor after class
was an efficient way to resolve contradictions I had found with my mental model.

7. Time management is key -- especially in undergrad. In my competitive undergrad program I

once learned that a friend who achieved top 5% status actually timed how long he ate.

While I do not suggest going to such extremes I offer this modest advice. I suggest spending no
more than 30 minutes trying to solve a problem you can't solve by yourself before appealing to
office hours or another knowledgeable student. I also suggest you ask questions of your
professor during or after class as opposed to leaving the class confused. This reduces wasted
time in an environment when time is a very precious commodity.

8. Going out and having fun is conducive to good grades. In my early undergrad years I studied
as hard as I could. And I thought this meant putting in as many studying hours as possible. But I
later realized that going out and having fun refreshed the mind and increased grades.
Unfortunately it took at least 2 years for me to understand this lesson.

9. Learn how to do advanced Google searches. This is an essential skill that enables you to
answer your own questions, quickly. At a minimum I suggest you learn how to use the following
Google search operators ~, -,*, AND,OR, and numeric ranges via the double dot ("..") operator.
The "site:" operator is also often helpful. I also found adding the word "tutorial" to a Google
search often yields great introductory materials.

10. Turn weaknesses into strengths. While studying for standardized exams I learned the
importance of addressing one's weaknesses as opposed to ignoring them. If you make a
mistake on a question, it is because of a weakness within you. If you do not address that
weakness it will follow you to the exam.

I learned this lesson when studying for standardized exams. I was able to legally buy 30 old
exams and thought the best approach to studying for the exam was to do as many old problems
as possible. But as I completed each exam I kept getting the same score (+/- 5%) over and
over. I had plateaued!

But then I made a tiny tweak and my scores kept going up. Specifically, after each old exam, I
would identify my weaknesses that led to each wrong answer, prioritize the weaknesses
according to the degree to which they affected my score, and would address them in that order.
When I did that, my scores increased steadily all the way to the highest possible percentile
(99%).

I later realized that such standardized tests are designed to provide consistent scores (if the
student does not study in between the subsequent exams to address their weaknesses). In fact
that is one of the statistical measures used to measure the quality of a standardized exam and
it's called "Reliability" (Google for "psychometric reliability" to see what I'm talking about).

I've used some similar techniques to do well on standardized exams (99%ile on the GRE)
though doing so involved me developing some custom software to take advantage of some of
these ideas. And after graduation I ended up founding three companies:PharmAchieve,
NurseAchieve and MD Achieve a trio of companies for preparing healthcare professionals for
their medical licensing exams. The first of the three, PharmAchieve emerged as the largest
pharmacy licensing test prep company in Canada (we train 800 pharmacists a year) in just 5
years based on some of the ideas presented here and has pass rates far exceeding multi-month
programs at Canadian universities. The other two companies were founded this year with the
aim of doing for doctors and nurses what we did for pharmacists.

I'll speak on behalf of a close friend of mine, who attended an unknown university from
where I am from (Lima, Peru), and got accepted for a fully funded PhD to work with the world-
leaders (including Nobel Laureates) at Systems Biology and Computational Biology at Harvard,
UC San Francisco and Rockefeller.

I'd like to add, that he beat his competitors at interviewing for Grad School from MIT,
Harvard, Caltech, Stanford, Yale, and other top institutions. It's one thing to go to get a PhD
at MIT because you did your undergrad at Caltech, but its a completely different story if a kid
from a developing country who went to a no-mans-land university beats you at grad school and
got to work with a Nobel Laureate. This guy was the deal, and he went from zero to hero.

His success story:

1) Discipline: He had no Facebook during his undergraduate years, and probably only went
online for doing homework, assignments or coordinating projects. This reduced his distraction
span to zero.

2) Emotional Intelligence: He could control his emotional and sexual impulses. He was very
socially intelligent around diverse groups, but he had in mind that having a girlfriend during his
undergraduate years would be a major distraction. Both he and I when we were freshman knew
that we wanted to go to USA for a PhD, so we were lifelong buddies who always noticed the
good and bad things about each other. While I would sometime complain that he didn't go out
on weekends (because he never did), he would always complain that I cared too much about
appearance, partying and personal marketing. He was not socially handicapped as some
people might think a 'nerd' would be, he was actually a very mature person who could talk about
anything.

3) Sacrifice: We came from a place where dogs literally walked inside our classroom, and
cockroaches would on occasion crawl in our backpack in class. He didn't let any of this get to
him. He actually used the poor infrastructure of our engineering building as a motivation,
something like "one day I'm going to get out of this hell hole, and do something great for
science". He also had a great sense of patriotism.

4) Stellar passion and motivation: The first semester, I found out that he had the highest GPA
of the whole class, and I immediately called him by the phone. I didn't understand a thing of
what he said because the signal was low. However, the next day he seemed very depressed
and told me that his grandfather had passed away. His grandfather was like his father to him
and he never got the chance to tell him that he achieved first place in his engineering class.
Little did we know, after a couple of weeks we realized not only was he the first in class, he was
first in the entire campus achieving the highest GPA (grades in Peru are from 0 to 20, and with
no curve). He graduated Summa Cum Laude 2 years ago, and got the highest GPA at our
university over the last 30 years. The other person previous to him was Barton Zwiebach, a
renowned Peruvian string theorist and Professor at MIT.

5) No pain, no gain: He went overkill sometimes to achieve his goal. I'm talking things like not
having lunch to study an extra hour, sleep 4-5 hours a day at least 5 days a week, sleeping on
the bus to get extra sleep time, and most dazzling thing of all was that most of the time he didn't
go to class. He just stayed studying in the library and was at least 2 or 3 weeks ahead of the
professor. Even if he did go to class, he rarely paid attention, he would go over his books to see
what methods other authors would teach. He would buy and download at least 5 different books
per subject and read them all to learn and to study for the test. He would go over all the proofs
and learn them, study them, do them, sometimes reinvent the proofs or see if he could grasp
the concept in anticipation of what the book would reveal.

6) Selecting friends: His paradigm for selecting friends (or colleagues) was impressive. He
didn't care if it was me (a spoiled rich kid), or the son of a blue-collar family that was a national
math Olympiad. He valued people for their ideas and it didn't matter to him where they were
from, but where they were going.

7) Becoming a preacher: He was never reluctant on teaching. Whenever anyone would ask
him something he would go over the concepts and explain it to him. This was really beneficial
for our closed group of friends, as we each learned different concepts and he checked with us
or we discussed any doubts we had.

8) Be ambitious: All of his life, he was the best at everything he did. Before enrolling at our
engineering school, he was making around $3000 a month by only winning Magic The
Gathering Card competitions, and he was Peru's #1 player and Ranked in the top 10 world
wide. *Not bad for a 16 year old, at that time.
9) He majored in Robotics Engineering: So yes, he did learn Optimal and Digital Control,
Fourier Analysis, Triple integrals, differential equations, etc.. We didn't have computers for our
programming tests, they were all done on pen and paper.

10) He was incredibly humble.

He started graduate school at 22.

If you don't have time to read the article, the hypothesis is that your brain absorbs information
best in small chunks, so the key simply is CONSISTENCY.

Learn topics that you are taught as soon as they are introduced in class and learn them well in
small chunks. Do your problem sets diligently and put effort into understanding the material.
Math requires practice if you want to solve questions consistently under exam conditions. How
much practice you need will depend on your level of maturity (in Math).

1 Learning is deeper and more durable when it is effortful

2 We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we are not
3 Re-reading text and mass practice of skills dont work. It gives a false sense of fluency
4 Retrival practice- recalling facts or concepts from memory- is more effective learning
strategy than review via reading.
5 Perodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthen retrieval routes and essential for hanging
onto the knowledge u wanna gain
6 When you space out 2 or more subjects making retrieval harder and feels less
productive or interleaving the practice of 2 or more subjects. => effort produces longer
lasting learning and more versatile application of it in later settings
7 Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solutions leads to better learning
8 Learn by going wide, drawing on ur aptitudes and resourcefulness leads to better
learning
9 Use testing as a tool to identify and bring up ur areas of weakness
10 The more you can elaborate by expressing it in ur own words, the stronger ur grasp of
the new learning will be and more connections u create to help u rmbr it later
11 Re-reading doesnt work
12 Make sense to re-read text once if some meaningful time has lapsed.
Retrieval practice, the kind of practice u make effort to recall and reflect on those concepts from
time to time. Retrival must be spaced out rather than becoming a mindless rep. Must take
congnitive effort
Need to recreate proofs from some clues

Learn via trial and error . Trying to come up with an answer.

Increase my ability -> maintaining a growth mindset.

Delibrately practice
Memory cues

#14150: I read on NUSWhispers recently a lot of CAP-related posts, especially from freshies,
asking whether to s/u certain modules of certain grades or if it is possible to achieve a First
Class Honours at the end of four years with a first semester grade of xxx. As a year 6 going to
year 7 (in other words I graduated 2 years ago), I would like to share some personal
experiences which I hope can be helpful for our eager juniors and freshies out there. Fresh out
of NS, like many guys, I was completely overwhelmed by the academic demands in uni life
during my first year in FoS. My CAP for the first year (2nd semester) was then 3.8 - 3.9. I did not
score anything above B+. Getting first class honours wasn't already in my mind then. I thought it
will probably be unachievable. However as I proceed to year 2, I realise I am able to perform
better with better grasp of the courses' demands. I even took the plunge to pursue a minor in
another faculty (FASS) with zero prior knowledge of the subject in my sec sch and jc days, just
because I am interested. Fast forward to my year 4 sem 1, my CAP improved to 4.4x, where the
grades of my last semester was essentially crucial to determine if I achieve FCH. Alas, I did well
enough for my final semester, especially with the help of 16MC FYP which I scored A, i
managed to barely push across the border with 4.5x CAP, a FCH which I did not even dare to
dream of at the end of my first year. So boys and girls, achieving a first class honours is not
impossible even with a starting CAP at the second lower honours range. While I do recognise
however that a little bit of luck is also essential, my climbing from second lower to FCH doesn't
come without hard work, persistence and determination. Quote a mural painted at the basketball
court of my junior college "The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in
determination". Do remember, however, that getting a FCH at the end of your 4 years or not is
not the only purpose in NUS. There are more than grades you can and should strive to achieve
in these 4 years. Join a CCA or two, go for exchange programmes, meet new people and make
new friends, make full use of your 4 years for once its over, you can't have it back. Hence, I wish
all of you juniors and freshies all the best in your academic pursuit in NUS.