Another problem area for students is remembering. Most of us think there are people with good memories and those with bad ones. In fact, there are only trained memories and untrained ones. Like knives, which have to be sharpened to keep them ready for use, what you learn, too, must be revised regularly to be able to recall it when needed.

The golden rule is to revise, and that is the only weapon against the formidable curve of forgetting. Psychologists find that revising immediately after studying something, then again the next day, the next week, ten days later, and again six months later goes a long way in helping you retain what you have learned. Besides this, mnemonic techniques can also help you remember.

Mnemonic techniques may be ingenious, judicious, or mechanical. The ingenious devices work by linking the known with the unknown. For example, your house has an entrance, which leads to a sofa; a little beyond is a staircase, which leads to a bedroom etc. To remember a list of items, say, bomb, lion and suitcase, in that order, one links the first item with one’s imagination to the entrance (the bombs blows up the entrance), the second to the second known object (the lion tearing the sofa), and the third to the suitcase (the suitcase rolling up and down the staircase). Making the images funny, colourful, and bizarre, helps in remembering better. It also makes learning fun.

Another ingenious technique is to initialize: that is make up a memorable word or sentence, whose letter begins with the first letter of the points you have to remember. The commonest example is VIBGYOR for violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, the colours of the spectrum. Another example is the sentence: Men very easily make jugs serve useful numerous purposes. The sentence is meaningless, but the initial letters of each word stand for the planets in their order from the sun, i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Another ingenious technique is to make up stories that connect unrelated points. For example if you have to remember the points: jungle, marriage, mango, and gold coins. Picture in your mind a jungle in which there is a marriage ceremony going on atop every tree. And people at the marriage are all raining mangoes at you. The mangoes burst when they hit you and out spill a bunch of gold coins. This sort of story helps you link unrelated points in an absurd, and unforgettable way.

Judicious techniques rely on logic and are easily applied to topics like science, analysis etc. One such technique is the 5W plus H. The five W`s are What, Where, When, Why, and Who, and the H stands for How. Using these questions as a matrix, one can sort out the facts one has studied but is unable to put in order.

The dullest way of learning is to learn by rote, but even in this it is better to work methodically. Definitions, formulae, poetry, classifications, etc have to be tackled by learning repeatedly. Noting them on small slips of paper and carrying them about, revising them occasionally will help. And, rather than reading them mindlessly, make sure that each time you repeat what you are learning, you do it with full attention. One repetition with attention is far better than several done carelessly.

These techniques call for constant application till they become a study habit with you. And once you have formed those habits you will have a formidable arsenal for tackling learning, which, of course, goes on for life.

“Best of luck for your exam preparations!”