Strategies for Study Management

Running head: STRATEGIES FOR STUDY MANAGEMENT
Strategies for Study Management
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

STRATEGIES FOR STUDY MANAGEMENT1
Preparing for an examination can be a daunting experience, while studying for a unit test
or assessment the night before is no less of an intimidating experience either. I for one, am a
person who is quite easily susceptible to pressure and who can crack easily on the night before a
test or an examination, even if I am well prepared. Of late however, I have been making use of a
number of strategies for managing my studies, especially on the eve of crucial events like an
examination, which have turned out to be quite effective and useful and which I will therefore
discuss and reflect on in detail, in the course of this essay.
One of the most important and effective study management strategies that I have utilized
is the art of meditation. I have engaged in the use of meditation on the night before a
mathematics examination and I have found that it has helped me to focus and concentrate on
numbers far more easily and quickly than I was able to before. Indeed much of the fright
associated with a math exam was combated for me because of the fact that I took recourse to
meditation to improve my ability to concentrate. Meditation is an activity that helps an individual
to gain calm over his sense of being and it assists in the improvement of concentration skills
while leading to a significant enhancement in attention span at the same given time (Valone,
2019). The weaknesses of meditation are few in number but it can be said that the only
weakness associated with this particular strategy is that it takes a long time to master (Farias,
2019). I for one had to practice meditation over a span of three to four weeks in order to be able
to engage in it for ten to fifteen minutes at a stretch. I will make use of mediation in the near
future, if I have a mathematics exam again to sit for or any other examination that requires me to
focus on numbers and to think logically and rationally. The use of meditation definitely proved
to be effective on the night prior to the math exam. I was able to concentrate on what I was

STRATEGIES FOR STUDY MANAGEMENT2
studying, I slept well and I was able to answer the exam questions the next day with a
considerable degree of ease and calmness.
The second most important study strategy that I have made use of at the time of preparing
for an examination is to sleep well on the night before an examination. I know that a lot of
people stay awake up to the wee hours of the night, studying and cramming every detail written
in their textbooks into their brains so that they are able to answer the exam questions well the
next day. However, my strategy was to get enough sleep, that is, at least, six to eight hours of
sleep on the night before the exam. According to academics and people who are employed in the
teaching profession, getting a good night’s sleep before an exam or a test or any important
activity is imperative as it helps to get the individual to be calm, to relax his nerves and to face
the ordeal that he is about to face with the tranquility that allows for success rather than failure.
Impatient and anxious exam participants are often seen to answer their questions incorrectly even
though they may be knowing the right or correct answers all along, all because of the feeling of
nervousness that prevails (Ashworth et al., 2015). Thus the attribute or strategy of sleeping well
on the night before a test is one that is positive in nature. The only weakness that comes with this
particular strategy is that it can make a person a bit too relaxed or complacent before the exam,
not providing the person with the alertness that is needed to pay attention to what is being asked
in the course of the exam (Ashworth et al., 2015). However, this weakness is rare. To sum up, I
found the strategy of sleeping well one night prior to giving a test or exam very effectively. It
worked quite well for me and it helped me to remember of the things that I had studied the
evening before.
The third vital strategy that I put to use in order to do better in my studies was to put pen
to paper. This meant jotting down on a piece of paper all the important points of the subject