How to Study for an Exam: Active Recall, Drilling, and Mental Prep

The most effective, research-backed ways to study, how to drill practice questions so they actually move your score, and how to walk into the exam room calm and confident.

Most students study by re-reading notes and highlighting textbooks — and most students are surprised by how little of it sticks on exam day. Decades of cognitive science research point to a different approach. Below are three pillars: how to actually learn material, how to drill practice questions so they translate into real score gains, and how to get your head right before you walk into the exam.

1. Study Smarter: Active Recall and Spaced Repetition

A large analysis of study techniques — covering 242 studies and over 169,000 students — found that two techniques consistently outperform everything else: practice testing (active recall) and distributed practice (spacing your study sessions over time).

Active recall means forcing your brain to retrieve an answer from memory — through flashcards, practice questions, or trying to explain a concept from scratch — instead of passively re-reading notes. Re-reading feels productive because the material feels familiar, but familiarity is not the same as being able to recall it under exam conditions.

Spaced repetition means reviewing material across multiple days instead of cramming it into one long session. Spacing interrupts your forgetting curve right before you’d lose the information, which forces your brain to work harder to retrieve it — and that extra effort is what builds a durable memory. Combining the two is far more effective than either alone, and research even shows that retrieval practice reduces exam anxiety and builds confidence going in.

2. How to Drill Practice Questions Properly

Doing practice questions is one of the highest-value things you can do — but how you drill matters as much as how many questions you do. Grinding through 100 questions in “browse mode” without reviewing your mistakes barely moves your score. A few rules make drilling far more effective:

Time yourself like the real exam. Practicing under the same time pressure you’ll face on exam day trains your pacing and reduces the shock of the clock running out. If a section gives you 60 seconds per item, drill in 60-second blocks — not unlimited time.

Review every wrong answer — and every answer you guessed right. The point of a practice question isn’t the score, it’s the explanation. If you got a question right by luck, you still have a gap. Read the explanation for the correct choice and for why the other options are wrong — that’s usually where the actual misconception lives.

Drill by topic first, then mix it up. When you’re learning a new topic, drill it in isolation so you can focus on the specific skill. Once you’re comfortable, switch to mixed sets across subjects (interleaving) — this mirrors the real exam, where topics are shuffled, and research shows interleaving improves your ability to tell similar-looking problem types apart.

Track your weak areas and keep coming back to them. Most students avoid the topics they’re worst at because it doesn’t feel good. That’s exactly backwards — your weakest topics are where additional drilling gives you the biggest score improvement per hour studied.

3. Mentally Preparing for Exam Day

Even well-prepared students can underperform if they walk into the exam anxious and exhausted. The research here is just as concrete as the study techniques above.

Protect your sleep in the final days. Sacrificing sleep to cram more almost always backfires — sleep is when your brain consolidates what you studied that day. A well-rested brain recalls information far more reliably than a sleep-deprived one that crammed an extra hour.

Write your worries down the night before. Studies on test anxiety have found that students who spent a few minutes freely writing out their worries about the exam — what they’re afraid of, why it matters — performed better than anxious students who didn’t. The act of putting the worry into words seems to clear mental “RAM” that would otherwise be spent suppressing it during the test.

Use your breath to reset. If you feel panic rising before or during the exam, a few slow, deep breaths (in through the nose, fully exhaling through the mouth) activate your body’s relaxation response and can pull you out of a spiral before it affects your performance.

Aim for “well,” not “perfect.” Going in expecting a flawless run adds pressure that works against you. Aim to perform well on the material you actually studied — a calmer mind makes fewer careless errors than a mind chasing perfection.

The Bottom Line

Study with active recall and spacing instead of re-reading. Drill practice questions under real exam conditions and review every explanation, not just your score. And in the final days, protect your sleep and deal with your anxiety on paper before it shows up in the exam room. None of this requires more hours — it requires spending the hours you already have more deliberately.