Video to Share

As the IB exams are approaching, I started to look for a study method more suitable for short term preparation. Just at the same time, Coach_K updated a video on Bilibili about this exact topic. I watched it and thought he indeed had a point, and the video was a great reminder for me, so I’m sharing it here¹: CK - How Should You Prepare for Exams? The Powerful Method of a Student Who Scored Nearly Full Marks in SAT (【CK】如何备考？高考近满分学霸的高能方法). The video lasts for 8 min 50 s.

Coach_K is really excellent and he’s a treasure-like uploader whom I’ve been following for a long time. I’ll talk about him again when I share time management methods and more study methods in the future. If you are interested, you can check out Coach_K’s other videos on Bilibili².

Key Points

Coach_K brings up 3 points in the video: Focus, Habit, and Feedback, in the order of increasing importance. He points out that:

1. Focusing on your task allows us to accomplish more in a short period of time.
2. Habits allow us to save energy by reducing the number of unnecessary decisions we need to make and reducing the effort we put into making those decisions.
3. Feedback allows us to check for and fill in the gaps in our knowledge. It also allows us to improve our strategy and tactics for doing practice problems, so that we can make the most out of each problem we do.

When talking about “feedback”, Coach_K emphasized the importance of reflection. Reflection means looking back at a problem that we did wrong, finding the reason why we made the mistake, suggesting a solution to the situation, and starting to improve based on the solution right away. As he said, reflection is indeed a painful process, but if we just do problems without analyzing why we make mistakes and without improving specifically in our weaker areas, we are just creating an illusion that we are trying, which is a waste of our time and energy.

My Thoughts

Coach_K’s point about habits was something I had never realized. I couldn’t agree more.

At school, when I follow a set schedule and have a teacher leading my revision, I get clear instructions, so I everything’s clear and I can revise without worrying much. At home, when I have to plan my daily revision, I get annoyed a lot by numerous small things: what paper I should do today, when I should do it, how long I should spend on it, and even smaller things such as what to eat for lunch and when to wash up. All of these trivial things require me to invest my energy to make decisions, reducing the amount of energy I have for exam preparation. These tedious and trivial tasks would affect me much less if I could “mindlessly” follow a schedule to study.

The similarity between Coach_K’s video and my previous thinking is that ‘reflection’ is painful but necessary. After listening to his summary, my own thoughts also became clearer.

My current history teacher never goes over our tests or exams with us in class. He lets us look at his written feedback and annotations on the papers on our own, and if we have questions, he asks us to approach him individually and talk to him one-on-one. This form of teaching gave us a lot of freedom, but because of this, I often did the papers, got them graded, put them aside, and never touched them again. Practically, I could always go back to review the exam papers. It didn’t really matter when I do that. So I allocated my limited time to more important and more urgent tasks in other subjects. Psychologically, I honestly didn’t dare to look at my own mistakes. Reviewing one’s own exam papers is indeed painful and must take a lot of effort. But when I actually picked up my exam papers and reviewed them word by word, and when I compared my answer with the model answer to see why exactly I lost marks, I did learn a lot and made huge progress. In my previous study process, I always skipped the reflection step. That’s why I got stuck with my grade in history.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I summarized the three tips for exam preparation in Coach_K’s video on Bilibili, which are focus, habit, and feedback. Then, I briefly cleared up my thoughts with reference to my own learning.

This blog post only mentions that reflection is painful, but in fact, I know that not only is reflection painful, but learning (or any work you do that gives actual output) is also painful. Or, to be more precise, it is energy consuming. I’ll be sharing more resources on learning methods on this blog later, and I’ll expand on this point as well.

Thank you for reading! I’m not a teacher but just an IB student who has bits of thoughts. If you have more thoughts and insights, feel free to discuss or share them here! (Also look for contact information at the end of the “About” section of this blog.) I’m really curious about what other people think!