How to study for finals: five exams, two weeks, the schedule that fits

Finals are a scheduling problem before they are a studying problem. With five exams over ten days, the mistake is to give each course its own day, and the course with the first exam every evening until it is over. The research on spacing says the opposite: every course comes back on several separate days, two courses an evening, and the course with the last exam starts in week one too. Here is the fortnight as a grid, 38 sessions of 50 minutes, with the evening after each exam already planned.

Why finals are a different problem from one test

Two things change when the test becomes finals.

The list is five lists. One unit test covers ten or fifteen ideas; a final covers a term of them, and you have five terms to cover at once. There is no evening long enough to reread all of it, which is the good news, because rereading was never the plan.

The days are shared. Each course cannot have the week to itself, so the question is not "how many hours" but "which course tonight." The spacing research is the answer. Across 254 studies, Cepeda and colleagues (2006) found that study spread over separate days produced better recall than the same time in one block. Their later study of more than 1,350 learners (Cepeda et al. 2008) measured how far apart the visits should be: the best gap grows with the time to the test, and for a test one or two weeks away the best gap between two visits was a day or a few days, not one long block the night before. A gap that is far too short, which is what one course every evening until its exam amounts to, costs more than a gap that is a little too long.

So a course left untouched for four days before its exam loses more than a course visited briefly on four separate days. That one sentence is the whole grid.

If you have one test in one week, the day-by-day plan for one test is the page. This page is the fortnight with five exams in it, and it rests on the four moves: answer first, space it, mix it, sleep.

Step 1: The five lists, then the first diagnostic for the earliest exam

1. One page per course. Write every idea the exam covers as a question, one line each, from the course outline or the unit headings, never from the notes. "How do I find a horizontal asymptote?" is a line you can attempt; "Rational functions" is a title you can only reread. A term's course is usually 20 to 30 lines. The one-page guide has the format.
2. The diagnostic for the earliest exam, on Day 1. One attempt at each question on that course's page, notes closed, two or three minutes each, then marked into three piles: can do, shaky, cannot. The honest-marking rules are short; "I would have got it" is the shaky pile.
3. The other four diagnostics over Days 2 to 4, one per session, as each course first comes up on the grid. A diagnostic is a session; it is not extra.

The five pages now say where every hour goes: the cannot piles first, the shaky piles second, the can-do piles once each before the exam.

Step 2: The grid, two courses an evening, every course every few days

The grid has five rules.

1. A session is 50 minutes of one course. Not two courses in one session; the switch costs a restart.
2. Two sessions on a school night, three on a weekend day. With a ten-minute break between them.
3. Two different courses an evening. The second course is the break from the first.
4. No course goes more than three days without a session until its exam is over. This is the spacing rule made into a calendar.
5. The course whose exam is first gets the most sessions early. The course whose exam is last still gets sessions in week one. It has the most days, so it ends with the most sessions; it must not start last.

Here is the fortnight for five Grade 12 courses, with exams on Day 10 (calculus, MCV4U), Day 12 (chemistry, SCH4U), Day 15 (biology, SBI4U), Day 16 (English, ENG4U) and Day 18 (physics, SPH4U). The exam days are an example, not anyone's real timetable; change the course names and move the exams to yours, keeping the five rules.

Before the first exam, Days 1 to 9 hold seven school nights (two sessions each, 14) and one weekend (three and three, 6): 20 sessions. They split as calculus 6, chemistry 4, biology 4, English 3, physics 3, which adds to 20. After the first exam, the remaining 18 sessions go to the four courses still waiting, and in the last two days to physics alone. The totals for the fortnight: calculus 6, chemistry 6, biology 7, English 8, physics 11. That is 38 sessions, 38 × 50 = 1,900 minutes, about 32 hours over 17 days, under two hours a day.

The course with the last exam ends with the most sessions. That is not favouritism; it is what the days after the other exams are for. Chapter 9 of the free playbook has a blank fortnight grid to copy.

Step 3: What a session is

Never rereading. A session has two parts: a recall pass on the course's list (the name of an idea at the top of a blank page, everything you know under it, or one problem from memory), then problems on what the pass missed. For a procedure that is one worked example read closely, the same problem redone cold, then a sibling with new numbers; how to study math has the mechanics, and they apply to chemistry and physics calculations as they are. Recall before rereading is the move with the strongest evidence in the review by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013), and the reason is Roediger and Karpicke (2006): a test of memory produces more lasting recall than another reading of the same page.

The last session before each exam is different: a mixed set under time. Six to ten problems from across the course, in random order, with a clock. Rohrer and Taylor (2007) found that students who practised shuffled problems did worse during practice and better on the test a week later than students who did one type at a time, because the test asks you to choose the method and the shuffled set is the only practice of that choice. Why mixing problem types beats blocked practice is the full argument.

How many hours to study for finals? In this grid, about 32 over the fortnight. But the hours are not the limit. The limit is how many separate days each idea comes back before its exam, and a 50-minute session on four different days does more for a course than four hours on one. If you have fewer evenings than the grid, keep the rules and shorten the sessions before you drop the days.

Step 4: The evening after an exam

The exam is done. Ten minutes to write down what surprised you, for the course's teacher or for next year; nothing more. A post-mortem beyond that changes no mark and costs tonight's two sessions.

Then a meal, a walk, and the next course's two sessions exactly as the grid says. On Day 10 in the grid, the calculus exam is in the morning and the evening is chemistry (its exam is in two days) and English. Bed at the same time as every other night of finals week.

Two exams on one day: the morning exam's error-log pass is the night before; the afternoon exam's error-log pass is at lunch, ten minutes, the wrong lines read once with the right line said before you uncover it. Nothing new either time. New material on exam day is not learned by the exam and it costs the attention the exam needs.

Step 5: Sleep is on the grid

A fixed bedtime for the whole fortnight, written on the grid like a session. The night before each exam is a light review and an early night: the course's error log once, the formula list once, then stop. What you studied in the day is stabilised while you sleep; Rasch and Born (2013) review decades of evidence that memory is consolidated during sleep, with the deep slow-wave stages doing much of the work for facts and procedures. An all-nighter trades the night that stores the fortnight's work for a few more hours of doing it. What one night without sleep costs has the measured numbers, and they are the reason the bedtime is a rule and not a suggestion.

Worked fortnight: the five-course grid, day by day

Each cell is one 50-minute session. "Recall + misses" is the ordinary session of Step 3; "diagnostic" is the first session of a course; "siblings" is a session spent on the cannot pile with worked examples and cold redos; "mixed set, timed" is the last real session before an exam; "error log" is the light review the night before; "exam" is the exam itself.

Day	Date	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3
1	Mon	Calculus: diagnostic	Chemistry: diagnostic
2	Tue	Biology: diagnostic	English: diagnostic
3	Wed	Calculus: recall + misses	Physics: diagnostic
4	Thu	Chemistry: siblings	Biology: recall + misses
5	Fri	Calculus: siblings	English: recall + misses
6	Sat	Chemistry: recall + misses	Physics: recall + misses	Biology: siblings
7	Sun	Calculus: recall + misses	English: siblings	Chemistry: siblings
8	Mon	Calculus: mixed set, timed	Biology: recall + misses
9	Tue	Calculus: error log	Physics: siblings
10	Wed	Calculus exam · Chemistry: mixed set, timed	English: recall + misses
11	Thu	Chemistry: error log	Biology: siblings
12	Fri	Chemistry exam · Physics: recall + misses	English: siblings
13	Sat	Biology: mixed set, timed	English: recall + misses	Physics: siblings
14	Sun	Biology: error log	Physics: recall + misses	English: mixed set, timed
15	Mon	Biology exam · English: error log	Physics: siblings
16	Tue	English exam · Physics: recall + misses	Physics: siblings
17	Wed	Physics: mixed set, timed	Physics: error log
18	Thu	Physics exam

Check the rules against the table. No course goes more than three days without a session before its exam: physics sits on Days 3, 6, 9, 12, then every day; biology on Days 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14; English on Days 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15. Two different courses every evening, with one exception: on Days 16 and 17 only physics is left, so both sessions are physics, with the ten-minute break between them and the two sessions doing different work (recall and misses, then siblings; a timed set, then the error log). Count the cells: 20 before the calculus exam, 38 in all.

When the plan slips

A lost evening is not a lost course. The two sessions you missed move to the next day's slots, the next day's sessions move one day on, and the first weekend slot that is free absorbs the overflow. Never double a course in one evening to catch up: two calculus sessions tonight is one calculus session's worth of learning and no chemistry. The one rule from the study plan that survives a bad week applies here as it does to a term: re-plan the week, do not abandon it.

If the slip is two evenings or more, cut the can-do piles first. They were going to get one pass each; they can get none. The cannot piles keep their sessions.

Midterms and three exams

The same grid with fewer rows. Three courses over ten days starting on a Monday, one session a school night and two on a weekend day, is 12 sessions: five school nights (5), a weekend (2 + 2 = 4), then three more school nights (3). Fifty minutes each, an hour a day on average. The rules are unchanged: two different courses a weekend day, no course more than three days without a session, the first midterm's course first and the last midterm's course still in week one. How to study for midterms is this page with the arithmetic shrunk.

The fortnight on one screen

1. Five lists, one page per course, ideas as questions from the outline.
2. Five diagnostics, the earliest exam's first, the rest over Days 2 to 4.
3. The grid: 50-minute sessions; two a school night, three a weekend day; two different courses an evening; no course more than three days without a session; the first exam's course front-loaded, the last exam's course started in week one.
4. A session is recall, then problems on the misses; the last session before an exam is a mixed set under time; the night before is the error log and an early night.
5. The evening after an exam is the next course's evening. Ten minutes of notes, a meal, a walk, two sessions.
6. One bedtime for the whole fortnight, written on the grid.