How can I choose the most important material to study?

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” - Abraham Lincoln

This simple question is one of the most commonly neglected. What we choose to learn is the most important component of our studying. If we spend many hours on material that is not important, then that time has been completely wasted if our goal is to successfully pass the exam.

What we learn has the greatest impact on how much time we will spend studying and what our result will be. Even we have often neglected reviewing material and have regretted this decision every time because such learning is very unfocused, scattered, and stressful. Such learning is discouraging and gives us an (often not false) feeling that we are not making progress. Over the years, we have thus developed our own way (checklist) for reviewing material, which we now take out every time before the actual studying even begins. It was formed through years of our experience with different types of exams, different subjects, and a desire to learn as much as possible in the shortest time about the topics that will be on the exam. Below we are sharing it with you so that you can organize your learning as best as possible as well.

Review of the material:

1. Collect all the material in one place

Do you have digital material or notes for the subject? Do you have physical notebooks, textbooks, or books?

If you’re dealing with digital notes, create a new folder for this subject on the computer. Put all the digital material on the subject in it. Old tests, classmates' notes, our notes, books, textbooks, exercises, diagrams, graphs, etc.

If you are dealing with physical notes, collect everything you have for the subject in a pile on the table. Notebooks, textbooks, your notes, sheets with tasks, etc.

At this step, we won't deal with how to organize the notes. The purpose of this step is simply to collect all the material in one place. Later on, we will analyze and organize it. If you have both types of material, digital and physical, then do both of the steps above.

1. Useless notes go into the archive

For digital notes, create an archive folder, and for physical notes, add a physical folder or space that will serve as an archive.

Now we’re doing the first quick review of our material, and in the archive, both digital and physical, we put away everything that we can see from afar won’t be used in our studying of the subject. These can be some sheets with interesting facts we received from the teacher, some tasks that will definitely not be represented on the exam, etc.

If we are not sure, then we skip this step for now. Later, when we’ll do a little more detailed analysis, we can place notes in the archive anytime it becomes apparent they aren’t important for the exam.

1. What type of exam is it?

Before we begin with further analysis, it is important to ask which type of exam is it. Our learning approach will differ depending on the type.

Possible types of exams can be:

a) multiple-choice

b) essay-type or short-answer questions

c) tasks requiring calculation

d) oral assessment

e) a combination of the above

This step is very important. It can save us hours of study time if we only know the type of exam that will take place. If we do not know this, we can check with the teacher, classmates, find old tests, etc.

1. Do we have old exams available?

Gather all old digital and physical exams in one folder.

If we have old exams available, we have just saved ourselves a lot of work. Some professors have only a small set of identical questions that appear on the exam. In such cases, we should not hesitate to use this to our advantage. Such a professor is only concerned with our ability to answer those questions that he or she considers most important in teaching the subject and does not seek other knowledge. If we want to expand our knowledge in this area, we can do so after completing the subject. To successfully complete the assessment in the shortest possible time, we should only learn those questions that are repeated on the assessment.

Most often we do not have the above example and identical questions rarely appear on assessments. Even if that’s the case, we gather the exams together as they will serve as a great starting point for further analysis.

1. Organize material by topics

Now is the time to organize the material by topics. We can simply rename digital notes with the topic title. If we have multiple documents on the same topic, we mark them with numbers at the end. If possible, we also organize physical notes so that notes on the same topic are in one place.

1. Make a list of all the topics

Open Word on the computer or take a piece of paper in your hand. Write down all the topics you have encountered for this subject. Does it have a designated textbook? Write down all its chapters on this list. Do you have a notebook with notes by chapters? Write them down. If we have multiple sources - a notebook, a textbook, etc., then we write down all the chapter titles that appear in our material. You should only write the shortest possible form of the title so that you still understand what the topic is about. For example, if the title is "Basic urine analysis", we can shorten it to "Urine". The purpose of this is to shorten very long titles, making it easier for us to navigate our list of topics.

So if we have chapters in our textbook on: diabetes, cholesterol

And in our notebook: cholesterol, urine

Then our final list is:

• diabetes
• cholesterol
• urine

The order of the topics is not important in this step.

1. How would you evaluate the importance of the topics?

We have come to the most difficult but the most important part of our review of the topics. Now it is time to decide which topics are most likely to appear on the exam.

How would you personally evaluate the importance of each topic? The following questions can help us:

• Which topics did the professor emphasize?
• Which topics do I consider most important?
• Which topics appear most frequently on past exams?
• Which topics have the most pages in the textbook?
• Which topics do my classmates prioritize?

Choose only the questions that you have answers to or can obtain. It is not important that your answers are perfect or free of errors. What is important is that you select all the questions or criteria that will help you evaluate the importance of the topics. You can also add your own criteria if you think it will help you in the analysis.

Now make a list for each question. For example, for the question "Which topics did the professor emphasize?" make a numbered list of the topics that were mentioned the most. The topic in first place is the one that was emphasized the most, the topic in second place is the one that was emphasized less, and so on.

Do the same for all the other questions you have selected for analysis.

Analyzing past exams can be particularly time-consuming, but this is often our most important criterion. Analyze all the old exams you have collected, and for each question on the exam, write down which topic it belongs to. Often, we may not know the topics well enough to immediately place the question. It is important to open our notes or digital files and use the search function in the document to find which topic the question might belong to. We can also use Google to help us. Do this for all the exams you have available. If you have a lot of exams, then focus only on the most recent five exams.

In the end, we get several numbered lists of topics by importance. We often have answers to all the questions above, so we get five lists of topics with numbers according to their importance. Interestingly, these lists can differ quite a bit from each other.

1. Final list of topics to review

Now we come to the final step. We need to combine all the lists we obtained in the previous step into a single list of topics by their importance. Which question or criterion do we think is the best? The professor's advice? Our classmates'? Old exams? The answer will vary for each subject.

If all our lists are identical, then we have no problem. But if they are different, then we need to weigh them ourselves to determine how to compile the final list of important topics. If one topic appears more often in first place, then we can assign it first place on our final list with certainty. If the second place differs everywhere, we decide based on which list we trust the most. And so on. Until we have a final list numbered from 1 onwards.

Our material review is now concluded, and if you have followed all the steps, you have the final list of priority topics for review. Below, we provide an example of our final list of priority topics in clinical chemistry. Typically, we would print out the list and cross off the topics we have already covered.

We then start our studying with the most important topic and continue down the list. We will publish more on how to effectively study with this list in the coming weeks. When using this list for studying, we can also use the Pareto principle.

We would like to emphasize that the purpose of this list is not to obtain a perfect list that will work flawlessly. The purpose of this list is to evaluate the likelihood of a topic appearing on the test. Sometimes, we may have the misfortune of getting a topic on the test that we have placed last on the list. But that should not deter us. If we have done a good job reviewing the material, we should expect to encounter most of the topics that we have prioritized on the test.

We must be aware that reviewing the material takes quite some time, but it is worth the investment every time. On average, it takes us three days, two hours per day, or approximately six hours to analyze each subject in college. Take as much time as you need. The material we choose to study is crucial if we want to do well on the test and learn the subject in the shortest possible time.

So? Are you sharpening your axes? 🪓