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Six patterns are enough to carry all fifty habits
Gian Pittard numbers fifty test-taking habits. Underneath them sit six mechanisms, and the six are what you actually have to learn.
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01 The diagnosis
Only one of the four reasons for exam fear is about not studying
Chapter 1 separates the causes before it offers a single technique. It finds four: not having put the work in, false assumptions about what a score means, treating grades as a measure of ability, and feeling that the outcome is out of your hands. Three of those are beliefs.
The last one has a name in the book: locus of control. Sarah and Martha both have a maths test tomorrow and both have put weeks of work in. Sarah glances through the likely questions and goes to bed early. Martha looks at the same pages, feels the numbers dancing, and is sure she will fail because anything could happen. The work is identical. The belief about who owns the result is not.
The false assumptions have a source too. A parent saying "I know you can score more than 90%" sets a marker, and a compliment like "you are so smart" quietly tells a student that the mark measures something fixed in them. The book's replacement is to praise the work: "you have worked really hard."
In other words, a person should ideally feel that their actions are responsible for their destiny.Gian Pittard, Chapter 1
Write one sentence naming what this exam actually measures. The book's answer is narrow on purpose: your mastery of a topic, and nothing about your personality. In a 2002 study it cites, almost 80% of college students treated their grades as a reflection of their self-worth.
02 Pattern one · prepare
Build the study plan backwards, from the time that is actually left
Habit 4 is called Start From the Back, and it inverts the usual method. Most people draw a plan from scratch and then discover it does not fit their week. Block the fixed commitments first, classes, sleep, meals, travel, leisure and chores, and what remains is the study budget. It is usually smaller than you assumed, and it is the only number worth planning against.
Then size the work. Habit 5 borrows the credit-hour ratio: two hours of study for every hour of class, so a ten-credit course needs at least twenty hours a week. Habit 6 says write the plan down, in a calendar or a book, and warns against the common opening mistake of cramming every subject into one day. Give hard and easy subjects separate days instead.
Habit 7 keeps it alive. Review the plan weekly, judge whether you are closer to the goals you set, and re-cut next week around assignments and tests. Breaks are part of the plan, not a failure of it: in a study the book cites, eighty-four people were given a fifty-minute task, and only the group that got breaks stayed efficient throughout.
Before you allocate a single study hour this week, mark every block that is already spoken for. Then count what is left, and only then divide it among subjects. If nothing is left, the honest question is which commitment you can forfeit.
03 Pattern two · prepare
Every named method in the book bolts the same step onto reading
SQ3R, REAP and PQ4R arrive in Chapter 3 as three separate techniques. Line them up and they share one move: at some point you close the book and produce the answer yourself. Everything else is scaffolding around that moment.
The book's own contrast makes the case. Clare reads Newton's laws and tries to memorise them; the next day she can only remember something about a stone. Ann reads the same three laws, closes the book, and writes down what she can recall. She finds the third one missing, looks it up, invents her own examples, and recalls the set again before bed and on the way to school. She answers.
Habits 13 and 14 sit underneath all of it. Habit 13 says give yourself regular feedback: track your own progress in a planner and reward the small goals you meet. Habit 14 gives a three-step approach for any subject: write down why you are studying it, connect each new topic to what you already know about it, then apply the knowledge to a real situation.
Spacing and interleaving decide when those retrievals happen. Habit 9 spreads the work across a day rather than one long sitting. Habit 10 mixes subjects on purpose, because confusions between similar ideas surface when you study them together and stay hidden when you keep them apart.
Passive reading will never bring the learner to the goal of comprehension.Gian Pittard, Chapter 3
Before you read the next chapter, turn every heading and subheading into a question and write it down. Read to answer your own list. Then close the book and answer it again from memory, in writing, which the book says holds better than saying it aloud.
04 Pattern three · prepare
Memory has three stages, and each technique acts on exactly one
Chapter 5 splits memory into encoding, storing and recall. That split is the useful part, because it tells you what each of the seven mnemonic habits is actually for, and when to reach for it.
Encoding is how a fact arrives, and it can arrive four ways: visually, elaboratively when it attaches to something you already know, semantically when the meaning goes in rather than the look, and acoustically as sound. Semantically encoded material is recalled best. Every mnemonic in the chapter forces an extra route in: a tune, an acronym, a silly sentence, a rhyme, a diagram, a card, a deliberate association between two ideas.
Storing is where chunking works. Ten digits are hard, and 3789 6543 21 is not. Sarah cannot hold the definition of photosynthesis until she breaks it into four clauses, each easy on its own. Recall is where you spend a cue. VIBGYOR is one word standing in for the colours of the rainbow, and it works because the cue and the set were linked when they went in.
Hear and you will forget; see and you will remember; do, and you will understand.Ancient proverb, quoted in Chapter 2
Take the definition you keep losing. Break it into clauses until each one is easy alone, then build a single cue for the order of the clauses. If the list has to come back in order, put the entries that matter most at the front and the end, because those are the positions that survive.
05 Pattern four · steady
A ritual works by making the next few minutes predictable
Chapter 6 is unusual for a study book: it takes lucky pens seriously enough to look for the evidence. What it finds is that the ritual does not act on the exam at all. It acts on you, and it does so through prediction.
The book's account is that the brain runs on sequences it can predict. Anxiety opens a blind spot where prediction fails, and that is the state you walk into an exam hall in. A ritual is a sequence you already know by heart, so running it hands the prediction back. Xygalatas and his colleagues measured the pull towards it: of sixty-two students, those told they would have to give a speech to a panel cleaned an object for longer and with more repetitive, more rigid strokes than those with no speech to give.
Confidence follows. In Damisch's experiment, people handed a golf ball described as lucky outperformed people handed an ordinary one, and people told the researchers had crossed their fingers for them did better than those told nothing.
The book also draws a line. Sarah's ritual is sleep, and on the night she sleeps badly she is tired but still steady. Tom's ritual is a crystal, and the morning he forgets it he recognises most of the questions and still falls apart. A ritual you cannot function without has stopped being a ritual.
Anything that gives us a sense of control is a ritual and can be used to alleviate anxiety.Gian Pittard, Chapter 6
Tonight, lay out everything you need for the morning and put it by the door. Tomorrow, be at the venue ten minutes early. Both are repeatable, both remove something that could go wrong, and neither depends on luck.
06 Pattern five · steady
Nerves help until a threshold, and the calming habits exist to pull you back under it
The Yerkes-Dodson law, which Chapter 4 leans on, is not a rule that nerves are bad. It is a curve. Performance climbs as arousal rises, reaches a peak, and then falls away. Yerkes and Dodson found it in rats running a maze: a mild shock made them faster, and a stronger one made them worse.
What matters for you is where the peak sits, because it moves with the task. The book is direct about this: a small class test can be handled with a high amount of anxiety, while a seriously important exam needs your anxiety kept really low. The more the exam matters, the less arousal you can afford, which is the reverse of how most people treat the big ones.
Past the peak the book describes hot cognition. The hypothalamus releases cortisol and norepinephrine, and those interfere with the hippocampus, which retrieves what you learned, and the prefrontal cortex, which keeps you reasoning. That is the mechanism behind going blank on material you knew last night.
Habits 42 to 45 are four ways back down the slope: visualization, progressive muscle relaxation, meditation and desensitization, which means sitting mock papers under exam conditions until the conditions stop triggering you. Habit 19 works earlier, on the thought itself, by asking of "I am not good enough" the plain question, is this true?
Stress can be conducive to our performance up to a point, as it helps us focus better. However, beyond that threshold, stress could be counterproductive and detrimental to performance.Gian Pittard, Chapter 6
Breathe in through the nose for four seconds. Hold for seven. Push the air out strongly through your mouth for eight. Three cycles, about a minute, and the book says you should feel calmer by the end of them.
07 Pattern six · perform
Inside the hall, marks turn on order and on the mark scheme
Chapters 7 and 9 are about the two hours themselves, and almost nothing in them is about knowing more. They are about where the time goes and how the answer is shaped.
Start with the cool-off period, the minutes before writing when you are allowed to read the paper. Sarah uses it to grade every question from 1 to 5 by difficulty, then answers all the 1s, then the 2s, and works up. Answering in printed order does the opposite: the hard questions eat the time the easy ones needed, and the easy marks are the ones you lose.
Then answer to the marks. A two-page essay for a two-mark question spends time you will want back, and a short paragraph for a fifteen-mark question costs marks outright. For questions you have to construct rather than choose, the book offers RACE: restate the question in your own words, answer it, cite your evidence, then explain that evidence. For multiple choice, the three wrong options have a name, distractors, and they are written to look plausible, so work by elimination rather than by picking.
Even randomly ticking boxes is better than leaving the questions unattended, as there is a probability of getting the answers right.Gian Pittard, Chapter 9
In your next mock paper, spend the cool-off period writing a difficulty number from 1 to 5 next to every question. Then answer all the 1s, then the 2s, and work up. Mark anything you abandon so you know where to come back.
08 The whole book
Six patterns, fifty habits, three phases
The book's own conclusion sorts the work into three steps: prepare systematically, bring the anxiety down, then master the skills of writing the paper. The six patterns fall neatly into those three.
Plan, retrieve, encode
Build the plan from the hours that are actually left. Retrieve instead of re-reading. Give every fact more than one route back in.
Ritual and arousal
Rehearsed steps restore the prediction anxiety takes away. Breathing, visualization and relaxation pull you back under the peak.
Order and mark scheme
Read the whole paper first, number every question 1 to 5, and answer in that order. Match the length of an answer to the marks on offer.
Habits 46 to 50 carry all of this past the exam. Carl Sagan's observation, which the book quotes, is that small children ask anything and by high school they have stopped. Keep a list of things you want to learn, keep asking, and the habits outlive the paper they were built for.
Adapted from The Top 50 Highly Effective Test-Taking Habits (Proven and Research-Based)
Gian Pittard · © 2023 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 34 cited sources in the source edition