I often learn by teaching so I’ll find other people who want to learn it and explain the things I’m learning to them. Or if it’s something really boring I’ll explain it to someone who’s willing to listen to it. I’ll also explain and narrate in my head imagining an old roommate or something. People I’ve given this strategy to IRL say they pretend they’re streaming, but I don’t do that because I don’t really watch streamers very much. The trick to it is to relate it to things you know, but not turn it into explaining capitalism because the test probably doesn’t have questions about labor valorization etc etc.

I think someone on hexbear at one point posted a ‘focus hack’ video that suggested putting on headphones with no music playing as though you’ve listened to music which ended, but you were focused so you didn’t notice. I don’t do this, but it makes sense to me. The video had a bunch of stuff like that, I think one was a plugin that removes recommendations from youtube so the website is just a search bar and it tricks people into realizing that they’re watching for convenience rather than looking for stuff and information.

For, like, exam trick questions, they usually fall into two categories:

• Specific methodology trick: you basically cannot do these by hand in enough time if you don’t know the trick.

Multiply 503 by 497.

Factor out a 3 and make it (500+3)*(500-3). Then it’s (250,000 - 9). (Doing this longhand would take forever even if you could obviously do it.)

• Specific knowledge trick: you basically cannot do these efficiently without just knowing from some other source.

The cube root of 64 is 4, because 4x4x4 is 64. What is the cube root of 1,728?

1,728 is a cubic foot so the answer is 12. (You’d have to test factors or do cube root division which is hard and takes a long time.)

Either way, look at old exam questions and example questions and figure out what the these tricks are for the test you’re taking.

Also, good luck. You probably know and remember much more than you think.