4 Controversial Study Tips (Your Teachers Won’t Tell You)

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Are you looking for new ideas on how to study more effectively? These controversial study tips share some hard truths few students and teachers will acknowledge.

If you are like me, reading the following tips will make you feel like someone finally understands you. 

Perhaps, you have already noticed these things, but FOMO and peer pressure kept you from doing it differently than everyone else. 

If this is you, then this short list might just be the push you need to make your studying more effective. 

Enjoy!

Read also: 9 Time Management Tips For Students | How To Manage Your Time

1. Study Tip – Don’t buy textbooks

As a freshman at Uni, I bought a textbook for each class, and I even read the recommended chapters and highlighted important information. 

I felt good about myself until the exams came closer, and I realized that I barely retained anything from what I’d read. And the worst part of it is that it took so long to work through these books, and it was mostly for nothing. 

Buying and reading textbooks made sense a few decades ago when online courses, recorded lectures, blog posts, lecture scripts, and premade flashcards didn’t exist. 

But nowadays? Honestly, information overload is a far bigger issue than a lack of information. 

You can get valid information from so many places online. You don’t need to buy a textbook and read it from beginning to end. 

I only use textbooks nowadays if I am looking for something specific. And in those cases, it’s far quicker to type in a few keywords in my university’s online library. 

2. Study Tip – Stop attending/watching lectures

In my first semester, I attended every single lecture. 

In my second semester, I dropped a few odd lectures. 

By the time my third and fourth semesters rolled around, my motivation to attend lectures was to see my friends more often. 

And now, as I have just gained my degree, I can honestly not tell you the last time I attended any lecture. It’s been at least over a year. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are some lectures you should attend because they are less about teaching you new information and more about active exam preparation. 

And some classes have mandatory attendance, of course. Don’t skip those! 

But for many other classes, you should take some time and truly ask yourself if you’ve learned a lot. Ask yourself if you learned enough to justify the time to attend the lecture and perhaps even prepare for it. And lastly, ask yourself if you could have gotten the same information elsewhere. 

Many of my peers used to tell me that they would attend fewer lectures, if only they could motivate themself to study at home. 

If that’s your issue, then spend the time in a library or even a coffee shop. There are many ways to overcome procrastination, so don’t let it become your justification for wasting your time in useless lectures. 

3. Study Tip – Stop creating your own notes/summaries

Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and YouTube are full of aesthetic study notes to motivate you to study. 

And surely, that motivation has pulled you into its thrall at least once, and you went ahead and painstakingly created gorgeous summaries with pretty colors and pictures or charts.

The problem is, how long did it take you to make those notes? And even more importantly, how much did you learn from it? 

If you are anything like me, the time/reward ratio is terrible. 

Many students say they learn very well by summarizing information, and if that’s you, great! 

However, it’s a big, albeit pretty, waste of time for other students. And if you are trying to achieve a demanding degree at university, you are likely short on time already. 

So, what to do instead? 

Firstly, go digital.

And no, I don’t mean digital in the sense of a tablet and pen, although that is an improvement, too. 

No, I recommend using a laptop for collecting information, where you can quickly and neatly copy and paste chunks of information into a single document. 

Create a suitable question for that chunk of information, and voila, you have a ‘flashcard’ and are ready to study. 

Read also: 10 Visual Learning Study Tips to Boost Your Exam Scores

4. Study Tip – Flashcards can be a time-consuming trap

Flashcards are usually seen as the holy grail of study techniques. They are an easy method to use, both for active recall and spaced repetition.

And if you use digital flashcards to study, things are even easier for you. You can study them whenever and wherever you want, and the spaced repetition is automized. 

I used Anki for my Law flashcards almost religiously for over a year. And things were going well. I happily spend some time every day reviewing my flashcards. 

But then a problem arose: I had so many flashcards that it took up too much time in my day. So I would spend hours daily on those flashcards if I tried to properly answer them with active recall. 

It felt like I barely had time to study because all my time was taken up with flashcards. 

Eventually, there came the point where I told myself ENOUGH. 

I had reviewed all these flashcards often enough and would stop trying to study all the pending flashcards daily.

I gave myself an hour or two for flashcards and then studied something else. 

So, my study tip is this: Don’t cling too rigidly to your flashcards. 

Especially in subjects with overwhelming amounts of information (e.g., law, biology, medicine), flashcards can become a bit of a time-consuming trap. 

Even more so if you create those flashcards yourself and keep adding to them over time. 

Instead, stop trying to fit all relevant information onto your flashcards. Consider buying or subscribing to a premade deck of cards that should have all the most important information on them. Then work through those cards and nothing more. 

You need to spend your study session with other things than just flashcards. 

Which one of these controversial study tips can you relate to? Tell us about the experiences you’ve had. Also, do you have any controversial study tips to add to this list? 

We always love hearing from you. 

Until next time, Felicity Seeker!