Studying for Exams Using S.M.A.R.T Goals

A study by Richardson et al. (2018) examined the study habits of Australian university students in the health sciences. 48% of these students were studying Sport Science, while the rest were from fields such as Physiotherapy, Podiatry, and Medical Imaging (Richardson et al., 2018). On average, these students were studying for around 4 hours per day (Richardson et al., 2018). This may not sound like a massive amount of time, and it may be slightly below the recommended hours for full time students, but it can be difficult to fit in when you have everyday chores, hobbies, self-care, and possibly part time work to think about.

One way of making it easier to develop a workable study schedule is to utilise the old heuristic that project managers and business studies lecturers love so much - The S.M.A.R.T framework.

Specific

Study goals should always be specific. For me, it was always essential to be specific about how much time I intended to spend studying each day. At my university, it was recommended that full-time students do around 1 hour of independent study for every 1 hour spent in class, amounting to approximately 30 hours per week. There’s no way that I would have been able to hit this number if I relied on my intuitive sense of how much time I needed to spend.

It can also be useful to start each study session with a clear idea of what to focus on. Do you have assignment feedback to review? Do you have palm cards to go through? Are there readings you need to finish? You may want to be more specific still and think about which content areas you are going to focus on over the next few hours of study.

Measurable

The most obvious way of making your study measurable is keeping a record of the amount of time you spend studying. However, you can also measure your progress another way, such as how many weeks/modules worth of content you intend to revise by the end of the week.

Measurable goals allow your study to feel gamified, which can increase motivation (Torres-Toukoumidis et al., 2021). Practice exams are especially useful, as you can strive towards the very tangible goal of obtaining a particular mark. You could plan to revise chapters 2 and 3 of a relevant textbook for the next hour, before attempting a practice test, which you intend to achieve at least 75% on.

Achievable

This criterion can also be related to the number of hours you spend studying. What else do you need to achieve throughout the day? Are you going to follow your university’s guidelines on how many hours you should study, given your study load? If this is not realistic, you can come up with another goal. Just make sure that it is measurable and achievable.

Making a plan to study for three hours per day may not be ideal for a full time student, but it is much better than deciding to study for five hours per day, then getting so burnt out that you avoid study entirely for days at a time.

Relevant

Relevance is the most general of the S.M.A.R.T criteria, and it can be difficult to determine where it fits into developing study goals. However, it is worth thinking about the obvious things, such as endeavouring to study material that will be covered by your exams.

Exams will sometimes focus heavily on content from the latter weeks of the unit, due to the fact that your assignments have already covered the early content. However, this is not a universal and it is important to listen to what lecturers and class tutors say about the contents of the exam.

Time-Bound

When do you plan to get through that backlog of lecture recordings by? How long will it take? And what time of day will you need to get started in order to get through them on time? Until you have done the maths, it is easy to overestimate the hours left in a day and underestimate how long a task will take.

This phenomenon of underestimating how long a task will take is very common and is referred to as the ‘planning fallacy’ (König et al., 2015). The planning fallacy may be caused by a tendency to only focus on the central aspects of a task, while forgetting how many other deliverables are involved. Worst still, the habit can spiral. When we underestimate how long a task will take once, then fail to reflect on our underestimation, this increases our chances of underestimating our completion time in future (König et al., 2015).

Therefore, if you create a clear, time-bound goal, even if you do not finish on time, at least the extent of your overestimation will be clear to see, and you can endeavour to create more realistic goals in future.

In Short:

SMART goals are useful and I won’t inundate you with more information because it’s time to get studying.

References

König, C. J., Wirz, A., Thomas, K. E., & Weidmann, R. (2015). The effects of previous misestimation of task duration on estimating future task duration. Current Psychology, 34, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-014-9236-3

Richardson, A., King, S., Olds, T., Parfitt, G., & Chiera, B. (2018). Study and life: How first year university students use their time. Student Success, 10(1), 17–31. https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v10i1.437

Torres-Toukoumidis, A., Carrera, P., Balcazar, I., & Balcazar, G. (2021). Descriptive study of motivation in gamification experiences from higher education: Systematic review of scientific literature. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 9(4), 727-733. https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2021.090403