How to study for a test tomorrow

By Planr.ai · 6 September 2026 · 5 min read

One evening. The goal is not to learn the course — that window closed. The goal is to convert the most marks per hour available to you right now, and the order matters more than the effort.

First 15 minutes: work out the shape of it

Do not open your notes yet. Find out how many questions, what type, what is weighted heaviest, and what topics are in scope. Ask the group chat if you have to.

This is fifteen minutes that changes what the other four hours are for. Studying the wrong three topics thoroughly is the most common way an all-nighter produces a bad grade.

Next 30 minutes: triage

List the topics and mark each A, B or C — could teach it, half know it, do not know it. Then ignore your As and, tonight, ignore most of your Cs.

With one evening, Cs are usually a bad trade. A C topic might take ninety minutes to reach half-marks. In ninety minutes you could take three B topics to full marks. Do the arithmetic and it is not close.

The exception is a C topic you know is heavily weighted. If the essay is worth 40% and you cannot do essays, that is where the evening goes, regardless.

The next two to three hours: blank page, per topic

For each B topic: close everything, write down what you know, then check and mark the gaps in another colour. Fix the gaps. Move to the next topic.

Twenty to twenty-five minutes a topic. Set a timer, and when it goes, move on even if the topic is not finished — an unfinished pass at six topics beats a perfect pass at two, because the exam samples across all of them.

Last 30 minutes: the things that are pure marks

Formulas, dates, definitions, vocabulary, the specific quote. Things that are worth marks by being reproduced exactly and cost nothing to understand.

Do these last because they are the most fragile in memory and you want them fresh. This is the one place cramming genuinely works — short-term memorisation is real, it just does not last, and tomorrow morning is all you need it to.

Then sleep, properly

Studying past the point of tiredness feels virtuous and costs you marks. Tired recall is measurably worse, and an exam is a recall task under time pressure.

If it is 1am and you are choosing between one more topic and an extra hour of sleep, take the sleep. This is not comfort advice; the extra topic is worth a few marks at most and the tiredness costs you across the whole paper.

What not to do tonight

Do not make flashcards. Making them is transcription and you will not have time to use them.
Do not rewrite your notes neatly. Zero marks come from this.
Do not start with the hardest topic to “get it out of the way”. You will spend two hours there and never reach the easy marks.
Do not study in the group chat. Ask your one specific question, then leave.

Tomorrow morning

Reread only your own gap lists from tonight — the things you got wrong and corrected. Ten minutes. No new material, and do not open the textbook, because finding something you do not know an hour before an exam has no upside.

If you have three hours instead of ninety minutes

Same shape, more repetitions. Spend the first thirty minutes working out what is on it and triaging topics, ninety minutes on the half-known topics with questions rather than notes, thirty minutes on a timed set of past questions, and the last thirty on whatever the timed set exposed.

The temptation with more time is to start at the beginning of the material and read forwards. That spends your best hour on the first unit, which is rarely where the marks you are missing live.

What to do in the last ten minutes

Nothing new. Read your own summary — the one you wrote, not the textbook — and say the three things you are least sure about out loud. Then stop and get to the exam early enough to sit down without rushing.

The morning of

Eat something, and do one short retrieval pass over the summary sheet rather than rereading the chapter. If a topic collapses in that pass, accept it: ninety minutes before a test is not enough time to learn a new topic, and trying is how the topics you did know get shaken loose.

Cramming does work for a test tomorrow, which is worth saying plainly — material learned the night before is usually still there the next morning. What it does not do is last. A week later most of it is gone, which is why a crammed unit reappears as a problem at finals and why the spaced version is worth the effort during term.