How to Study for Midterms: A 14-Day Plan Built on Learning Science

For most fall semesters, midterm season runs through October, and it rarely arrives one exam at a time. If you are reading this with about two weeks to go, you have enough time. The catch is that the methods most students reach for first (rereading notes, highlighting, one long session the night before) are the ones with the weakest evidence behind them.

This guide covers how to study for midterms with the methods that do have evidence behind them, arranged into a 14-day plan you can copy. Short on time? Skip to the three-day version.

What the research says actually works

In 2013, a team of cognitive psychologists led by John Dunlosky rated ten common study techniques by how well the research supports them. Only two earned the top rating: practice testing and distributed practice (spreading study out over time). Rereading, highlighting and summarizing were rated low. Dunlosky's own summary for teachers and students, "Strengthening the Student Toolbox", is free to read and worth ten minutes.

Three findings do most of the work in the plan below:

• Recalling beats rereading. In a well-known experiment, students who practiced recalling a passage remembered more of it a week later than students who spent the same time rereading it, even though the rereaders felt more confident (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).
• Spacing beats cramming. In a study of more than 1,350 people, the best gap between review sessions was about 20% of the time until the test when the test was a few weeks away (Cepeda et al., 2008). With an exam 14 days out, that means coming back to a topic every two to three days.
• Mixing beats blocking. College students who practiced math problems with the problem types shuffled together scored far higher on a test a week later than students who practiced one type at a time (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007).

The uncomfortable part is that all three feel slower. Pulling an answer out of memory is harder than rereading it, and a mixed problem set is harder than ten identical problems in a row. That difficulty is the point: if a session feels easy, you are probably reviewing what you already know.

To see the shape of the problem, try Lykke's free forgetting-curve simulator: retention drops fast in the first days after you learn something, and each kind of review slows the drop by a different amount. The free AP Psychology course explains the mechanics behind it, from how memories are encoded to why forgetting is fast at first and then slows.

Before you start: build an exam map

Spend 30 minutes on this before anything else. For each midterm, write down:

• Date, time and room. Note whether it's in your usual class slot or a separate evening exam.
• What it covers. Chapters, lectures, readings and problem sets. If your professor has posted learning objectives or a study guide, that is your checklist.
• The format. Multiple choice, problems, short answer, essays, open or closed book. The format decides how you practice.
• The weight. A midterm worth 30% of your grade deserves a bigger share of the two weeks than one worth 10%.
• Practice material. Old exams, practice problems, quiz questions, end-of-chapter questions, review sessions and office hours.

If something is unclear, ask this week, not the day before. "Which chapters does the midterm cover, and what's the format?" is a fair question to ask in class, in office hours or on the course discussion board.

The 14-day midterm study plan

This plan assumes one major midterm and about 60 to 90 minutes a day for it, alongside your other classes. If you have two or three midterms in the same stretch, run the plans side by side and alternate subjects within each day, which gives you spacing for free.

Days 14–11: gather and turn notes into questions

Go through the material once, in order, but don't just reread it. For each lecture or chapter, write five to ten questions whose answers are the ideas you'd expect to see on the exam: a definition, a "why does this happen" question, a worked problem, a comparison between two concepts. Put them on flashcards or in a document with the answers hidden.

Mark anything you don't understand and take it to office hours now, while you still have time to practice what you learn there.

Days 10–7: recall, spaced out

Now the work is answering, not reading. Go through your questions and answer each one from memory before you check. Write or say the whole answer; "I'd know it if I saw it" doesn't count. Put what you missed in a pile to see again tomorrow and what you got right in a pile to see again in three days. Cover every topic at least twice in these four days.

For problem-based classes (calculus, physics, chemistry, statistics, economics, accounting), recall means working problems with the solutions closed. Redo the homework problems you got wrong the first time before you look for new ones. When you run out, Lykke's free AP courses, which cover introductory college-level material, have quizzes throughout: AP Calculus AB, AP Statistics, AP Physics 1, AP Chemistry and AP Microeconomics.

Days 6–3: mixed practice under exam conditions

Stop studying topic by topic. Shuffle questions and problems from the whole exam together so you have to recognize which idea or method each one needs. On the real exam, questions won't arrive labeled by chapter.

Take one full practice exam (an old exam if you can get one) on a timer, notes closed, in one sitting. Grade it honestly and label every miss by cause: didn't know it, knew it but applied it wrong, ran out of time, or a careless slip. Each cause has a different fix.

Days 2–1: fix the misses, then rest

Spend these two days on your list of misses, not on the topics you already get right. Rework each missed problem from a blank page. Do one last shuffled pass through your questions.

Then stop at a normal hour. The CDC recommends seven or more hours of sleep a night for adults. A meta-analysis of sleep deprivation studies found that losing a night of sleep hurts memory for material learned before it, and hurts even more for anything you try to learn after it (Newbury et al., 2021). The AP Psychology course's section on sleep covers what your brain is doing during those hours.

Exam day

Do 15 to 20 minutes of easy recall in the morning (your flashcards, not new material), eat something, and get to the room early. When the exam starts, skim every question first and answer the ones you can do fastest, so a hard problem early on can't eat your time.

How to study for different kinds of midterms

Multiple choice

Multiple choice looks like a recognition test, but the best preparation is still recall: cover the options and answer the question before you look at them. When you review, work out why each wrong option is wrong. Distractors are usually built from common mistakes, and naming the mistake is how you stop making it.

Problem-solving exams

In quantitative courses your score depends on doing problems correctly under time pressure, so that is what you practice. Complete at least two full timed sets before the exam. Keep a one-page sheet of formulas and when each one applies, even for a closed-book exam: building it is part of the review.

Short-answer and essay exams

Predict the prompts. Go through the learning objectives and the themes your professor kept returning to in lectures, and write five to eight likely questions. For each one, outline an answer from memory in ten minutes (a claim, three pieces of evidence from the readings, one counterargument), then check the outline against your notes.

Open-book and take-home exams

Open-book exams tend to test whether you can apply ideas, not whether you can find them, so the questions are often harder. Prepare as you would for a closed-book exam, then make a short index of where each topic lives in your notes so you don't lose time searching.

If you only have three days

Three days is enough for a focused version of the plan. Cut the gathering phase to one evening and go straight to recall.

1. Day 1: Build the exam map in 20 minutes. Rank topics by weight and by how shaky you feel about them. Write questions for the top half only, then answer them from memory.
2. Day 2: Take a practice exam or a mixed problem set on a timer. Go through every miss and fix the ones that come from not knowing the material.
3. Day 3: Rework the misses, do one shuffled pass through your questions, and go to bed on time.

What to drop: rewriting notes, making elaborate study guides and rereading the textbook. They take hours, and rereading and summarizing were among the techniques rated least useful in the Dunlosky review.

Mistakes that cost the most points

• Rereading until it feels familiar. Familiarity is not recall. If you can't produce the answer with the page closed, you don't have it yet.
• Studying topics in the order they were taught. Blocked practice feels productive but doesn't train you to choose the right method when the questions are mixed.
• Practicing the wrong format. Flashcards for an exam made of long problems, or problem sets for an essay exam, build a skill you won't be tested on.
• Saving questions for the night before. Office hours right before an exam are crowded, and you have no time left to practice what you learn there.
• Trading sleep for more hours. The last few hours of a late night go to tired reading, and the sleep you give up is when your brain holds on to what you studied.

To practice the recall this plan depends on, Lykke's free ready-made courses on Explore come with flashcards and quizzes, and How it works shows what Lykke can take off your plate during exam season.