It's that time of year again—the leaves are turning, the candy aisle is fully stocked, and somewhere in a backpack near you, a pile of midterm study guides is multiplying like Halloween decorations on your neighbor's lawn. Between costume planning and candy strategy, it's also prime time to start gearing up for midterms and finals.
But before you commit to another all-night highlighting session fueled by fun-size candy bars, let's talk about which study habits are legitimately effective, and which ones are, frankly, more myth than method. Consider this your field guide to separating the real magic from the tricks that are just tricks.
We've all been tempted. One marathon study session, a few energy drinks, and surely it'll stick, right? Not so much. Researchers who've studied "massed" learning (cramming everything into one sitting) versus "spaced" learning (spreading the same material across several shorter sessions) have found that spacing wins by a wide margin for long-term retention, even when the total study time is identical. Cramming might get you through tomorrow's quiz, but the information tends to evaporate almost as fast as it went in, which is a problem when finals cover months of material at once.
Rereading a chapter until the words start to blur, or coating your notes in a rainbow of highlighter ink, feels productive. It feels like you're doing something. Unfortunately, feeling productive and actually learning are two different things. A widely cited review of ten common study techniques by cognitive scientist John Dunlosky and colleagues, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, rated rereading and highlighting as having low utility—they create a false sense of familiarity without building the kind of retrieval strength that shows up on test day.
Visual learner, auditory learner, kinesthetic learner–you've probably heard (or been told) that you learn best one particular way, and that your study methods should be built around it. It's a comforting idea, but a landmark 2008 review by psychologist Harold Pashler and colleagues found no credible evidence that matching instruction to someone's self-reported style actually improves how well they learn. That doesn't mean variety is pointless; mixing up how you engage with material (diagrams, discussion, writing, practice problems) can genuinely help. It just means there's no evidence that sorting yourself into a single "type" and studying that way exclusively gives you an advantage.
Texting a friend, half-watching a show, and "studying" biology all at once might feel efficient, but your brain isn't actually doing all three at the same time—it's rapidly switching between them, and every switch costs you focus and time. The American Psychological Association's research on "switching costs" notes that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can eat up a significant chunk of otherwise-productive time. What looks like multitasking is really just fragmented, lower-quality studying stretched over a longer period.
This one often trips students up in the opposite direction.Retrieval practice and spacing often feel harder and slower than rereading or cramming, so it's tempting to assume they're less effective. In reality, that difficulty is doing the work. UCLA memory researcher Robert Bjork coined the term "desirable difficulty" for this exact phenomenon; the mental effort of struggling to recall something, rather than passively reviewing it, is part of what makes the memory stick.
Midterms (and eventually finals) will be here before the last of the candy is gone. The good news is that the strategies that actually move the needle—spacing, retrieval, focus—aren't complicated or time-consuming. They just take swapping out a few habits that feel productive for a few that actually are. No cauldron, potion, or costume required—just a little consistency, spread out over time.
Happy studying, and happy haunting.
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Jordan Rossman graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor's Degree in Social Work and New York University with a Master's Degree in Journalism, with a specialization in Digital Media and Storytelling. Jordan collaborates with the Cram Crew team to educate students and their families on timely topics within the College Readiness, Test Preparation, and Academic Support programs.
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