The Power of Notecards

To some a notecard is just a standard three-inch by five-inch blank space to write down a quick number, or to leave yourself a memo for tomorrow, but as for me they were a life saver!  These little blank sheets of card stock saved my butt more times than I can count, from studying molecular structures in a general chemistry class, plotting out the flow of money in micro-economics class, to memorizing the vast amounts of Kingdom and Phyla names in zoology.  They were worth their weight in gold to me and I easily went through several thousands of them throughout my college career.  To give you some examples of how I structured the cards we’ll look at general chemistry.  When it was time to cram for a chemistry exam, which I never recommend, I would whip out the notecards and first tackle all of the terms in the chapters that are being tested.  What I found to work best was writing the term on one side and the definition on the other, this is pretty standard among most people, but when I would read through the cards I would make a stack of all cards that I had gotten correct and another stack for the incorrect.  After going through the entire stack first, I would then go through the stack of incorrect cards.  When going through these I would add the correctly answered cards to the “correct” stack and continue refining the incorrect stack until I had gotten them all correct.  Once I had gotten them all correct I would always go through the entire stack 1-2 more times to really commit everything to memory.  I used this same principle for all classes, even in calculus when having to memorize all of the degree and radian measurements of a 360-degree circle.  One class that notecards definitely saved my life in was zoology, but it did not come without a lot of hard work.  When it came to memorizing all of the classification names of animals these cards were a must!  The best advice I could give to you is to prepare the notecards as you go through chapters in the textbook.  Whenever you finish a chapter in the book immediately that night make yourself sit down and prepare the cards for that chapter.  If you wait till one or two nights before the test you will find yourself scrambling to get the notecards made with little time to sit down and study them.  I made this very mistake early in my college career and eventually corrected the mistake and immediately noticed a different in test grades and information retention.  Everyone learns differently but this is a tried and true method to memorize as much information as quickly and efficiently as possible, but remember it is much easier to do this as you go through chapters instead of cramming it all in right before test day.