In the video that I posted last week, I talked about a method of doing practice questions that allows you to learn more from practice questions to get better marks.

This involves a bit more initial work. You need to mark every question with a confidence score and review each of the questions with low confidence so that your confidence improves over time.

You invest some time studying the topic of the questions you don’t know much about, and that enables you to improve your knowledge and grades.

One of the comments raised an interesting question - doesn’t this take more time?

As someone that cares a lot about efficiency, I think this is a very valid concern. Additionally, it applies to many of the techniques I teach on my YouTube channel.

It’s certainly true that these techniques take a larger initial investment of time, but their overall efficiency is higher, leading to less studying in the long run.

Here’s why

Imagine two scenarios: You do 400 practice questions, but spend a lot less time reviewing each one. You do 100 practice questions, spending more time reviewing them.

In the first scenario, there are a few benefits. You’re more likely to see practice questions from all of the topics you might be assessed on. Because of the volume of practice questions you have completed, your pattern recognition may be better if questions are repeated on your actual exam.

However, there are several disadvantages.

Because you aren’t spending as much time reviewing, you will not learn as much from each question. You’re likely to correct some mistakes, but you will make other mistakes repeatedly because (1) you don’t notice them or (2) you don’t review them. If your exam has questions that are largely different to the ones you do for practice, you’re more likely to get them wrong as you lack foundational knowledge.

If you make mistakes on the same topic repeatedly, you’re essentially wasting time every time you complete that question, which is not efficient.

In the alternate scenario, our fundamental goal is to gain more knowledge. We may complete fewer questions initially, yet we learn more from each question. As we fill our gaps, questions will get easier, take less time to complete, leading to an efficient system. Our knowledge will be more transferable, and less pattern recognition based.

This can be described on a graph that looks a bit like this:

It is certainly true that for a very short period of time, recognising will be more efficient than learning, and this amount of time will change depending on your existing system.

However, learning will quickly overtake recognition in efficiency for the vast majority of people.

This is an important nuance to the discussion around study techniques that is often missed, and explains why I think habits of learning are so important.

Without trying to move towards an exponential curve of learning, you’ll always be fighting to keep up.

- Emil