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Day 5: How to have total confidence in your knowledge

In today’s lesson, I’m going to talk about confidence. In particular, how you can have total confidence in your knowledge whenever you need to walk into an exam, interview or new project.

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Confidence matters. Low confidence adds stress to your life. It makes it harder to enjoy what you’re learning. Worse, it can even kill your productivity as many students avoid the pain of low confidence by not studying at all.

Improving your confidence without improving your skill, however, is dangerous. Many students have felt the snap of hard exam that they thought was going to be easy. If confidence is good, overconfidence is definitely bad.

Instead, I want to focus on genuine confidence. This is the feeling you get when you know that you know a subject, and you’ve proven to yourself that you know it. This kind of confidence transfers to being relaxed and focused during exams, interviews or projects.

So how do you get it?

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The answer is fairly simple: you test yourself. If you score high on your self tests, you can walk into exams with total confidence knowing you’ve already passed a more rigorous assessment of your own devising.

The problem with self-testing is that many students under-use this tactic, especially in classes where the professor doesn’t provide them with material. (Or in real life situations, where there are no past exams).

The best and most obvious source for practice are past versions of the test or exam you plan to write. If you’re doing a standardized test (SAT, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) and you aren’t doing past exams with solutions, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. The best way to test yourself is to use a guide that will have the same format and difficulty as the test you’re going to write.

If supply of these is limited, I would ration them out over your studying time. Let’s say you have access to two practice exams, I’d do one a few weeks before your exam to inform your studying efforts and one a few days before to see if there’s any last-minute touch-ups you need.

If past exams are not available, or they are too limited to give you a large sampling of the course material (some exams may only cover a small portion of the course), or you’re in a situation which doesn’t have an exam, the Question Book Method works well.

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The Question Book Method

The self-quiz method is a confidence building strategy that works best when you start using it as soon as you start learning something. If you apply it from the very first day of your classes, you’ll be far more relaxed, confident and unstressed in your entire semester.

Here’s how it works: make a question book when covering the class with solutions. Throughout the term, randomly test yourself from questions draw from that book. When you get to prepare for your final exam, go through and make sure you can correctly answer every question (or some representative sample, if the list of questions is too large).

Step One: Make a Question Book

The first step is to make a book that holds questions and answers for everything you covered in the course. Here’s how to make one:

• First, get a separate notebook (or a section of your existing notebook for a class).
• When in lectures or watching videos, restate any important information as a question in the book (you may need to spend a few minutes writing these after a lecture if notetaking is too intensive).
• When reading a textbook, rephrase major ideas, facts or problems as questions in your book.
• If you’re in a class with a significant problem solving portion (math, engineering, etc.) include problems from your assignments as well. You might want to change some of the trivial details of the problem so that it doesn’t trigger your memory when you do it again.
• Whenever you add a question, make a reference to your notes, textbook, videos or problem solutions for where you can find an answer to save time later.
• Number the problems. This will be helpful in creating unbiased, random sampling of problems when you later conduct self-tests.

At the end, you should have everything that was important in the class, but rephrased as a question. If you were able to, before the exam, answer every question in this book correctly you should be able to score very well on the real exam.

Two words of caution: one on problem solving and one on a problem we encountered in day 3, inflexible knowledge.

The first caveat to this is that it won’t cover the problem solving, by default. If you’re in a class that involves solving novel problems, then you need to make sure the question book contains representative problems as well. I’d recommend adding in every problem from your past assignments, labs, recitations or even from the textbook (if the textbook problems are similar to those tested in class).

The second caveat is that questions may be phrased so as to not be too difficult. That is, because you know what section the question is in, and you’ve written it in such a way that the answer is obvious, you may not be testing yourself well. Here, you could have inflexible knowledge, do well on the self-test, but when you’re faced with a real exam, you’d break down.

The solution in both cases is to try to write questions to similar difficulty as they would be presented on an exam.

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Step Two: Periodic Self-Testing

The next step is to periodically test yourself on past knowledge throughout the year. This will build your confidence in the subject and also give you pointers as to which topics you’re struggling with.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Set aside one hour per week, per class in your schedule.
2. Use a random number generator to pick a question randomly from your book. Random.org is a good website for this–just put 1 and the highest problem you’ve written down so far in your book and hit randomize.
3. Keep doing questions until your hour is up.
4. Be honest to yourself whether you get the question right or wrong. If you got it wrong, put a star next to it. If you got it right, and there was a star next to the problem, remove the star (best done in pencil).

If you’re in a problem solving class that has significant problem sets, this step may be unnecessary. However, keep in mind that problem sets are often section specific, so that may lead to weaknesses on comprehensive exams which will test you on information from past sections.

What you’re accomplishing with this is twofold: first, you’re building your confidence in the subject so that you can take on any test or exam without issue; second, you’re building a list of weak points. Starred questions become your primary studying focus in the next step.

Step Three: Final, Comprehensive Testing

The final step is to go through and build yourself an “exam” from your question book. If you’re preparing for a job interview or a new project, the format can be modified to mimic your testing situation (job interviews are probably better done with a partner reading out your questions).

First, take every starred question and put it in your exam. All of these must be answered correctly to move on.

Next, add randomly sampled questions from the course. This should be a bulk of the questions if you didn’t do much review work and therefore don’t have many starred questions. If you have many starred questions, you might want to focus solely on those first.

Once you’ve put together your exam, write it and grade yourself. If you can score highly (90%+) you’re ready to face any real exams you might have coming up. If you can’t score highly, repeat the exercise with all randomly sampled questions until you can get at least 90-95%.

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In a study of research done on various learning methods, practice problems and self-testing was unanimously found to be the most effective method. Therefore, this method is probably more important than all the others, since it gives a reliable way to self-test for any class, regardless of the material you have available. (Source)

This method may sound slow, but it’s not. The time it adds onto your classes is easily repaid in the significant reduction of studying time you need to do. In classes where I’ve used a self-testing approach, I’ve often gotten away with less than 3 hours of studying time on a final exam, while still scoring an A+.

If you do the periodic review plan, you might be able to eliminate studying before an exam altogether, as I have on many of my university exams.

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Day Five Homework

Once again, this isn’t a method you can apply in fifteen minutes. To work properly, you need to do it throughout an entire course (or spend several hours to build a question book out of past notes/textbook chapters).

For this homework, I want you to focus on something simple: rephrasing a statement you’ve learned as a question. Here’s the steps:

1. Take something you’ve learned from a video, lecture, website or textbook.
2. Rephrase it as a question to be answered or a problem to be solved.
3. Write the question in such a way that the answer isn’t secretly embedded in the question or too easy.

Next hit REPLY and give me your fact/statement/problem and your question rephrased!

Best,
-Scott

P.S. – You can use this method even if you don’t have an exam. Next time you’re reading a book you want to remember. Try making the notes as questions with references to page numbers as the solutions. Then, when you’ve finished, see how many you can answer successfully.