A one-week study plan before a test

A week is enough time to learn a test's worth of material properly, if you spend it testing yourself and spacing your practice instead of rereading. Here is a plan that does that, about 30 to 45 minutes a day.

Before you start: map the test

Find out exactly what the test covers: chapters, lecture dates, the study guide if there is one. Split it into four or five topics of similar size. Each topic will become one Summit route, so a topic should be about one lecture or one textbook section. (Our guide to getting a good route from photos and PDFs covers how much to put in each.)

Day 1: first pass on everything

Read through each topic once, carefully, without highlighting everything. Then make a route for the first two topics and climb each once. Don't worry about your score: today's job is to find out what you don't know yet. Every prompt you miss goes into your review queue for tomorrow automatically.

Day 2: the rest of the topics

Do your reviews first; they take a few minutes. Then make and climb routes for the remaining topics. When you miss a prompt, open the answer map and tap Why? on two or three answers you didn't think of. Reading an explanation right after a miss is one of the most effective moments to learn.

Day 3: go back to the start

Reviews first. Then climb Day 1's routes again. This is a deliberate gap: two days is long enough that some of it has faded, so pulling it back out takes effort, and that effort is what makes it stick. Aim to beat your first score by reaching for answers past the obvious ones.

Day 4: fill the gaps

Look at which topics gave you the lowest scores. Go back to your notes for those topics only, and read the parts behind the prompts you keep missing. Then make a fresh route for each weak topic: put its notes back in the box with Use notes and map it again, which gives you new prompts on the same material.

Day 5: mix it up

Reviews first. Then climb your routes in a mixed order rather than topic by topic. Exams don't tell you which chapter a question comes from; switching between topics trains you to recognize which idea applies. If you have Summit Plus, the endless climb does this mixing for you across all your routes.

Day 6: test conditions

Do one round as close to the real test as you can: no notes, no phone notifications, all routes back to back. Then, separately, try writing out answers to the study guide's questions or past exam questions from memory. Summit trains recall of facts and examples; written practice trains you to use them in full answers.

Day 7: light review and rest

Do your reviews and one climb of your weakest route, then stop. The night before a test is for sleep, not for new material: memory consolidates during sleep, and a tired brain retrieves poorly. Lay out what you need for the morning and go to bed at a normal time.

Only two or three days?

Compress the plan, but keep the two ingredients that matter most: testing yourself and spacing.

• Day 1: make routes for every topic and climb each once. Climb them all again in the evening.
• Day 2: reviews in the morning, then reread only the material behind your misses. Climb everything again in the afternoon, in mixed order.
• Day 3 (if you have it): one final round in the morning, then rest.

Climbing the same route three times across a day and a half beats climbing it three times in a row. Even a few hours' gap helps.

Why this works

The plan leans on two of the best-supported findings in learning research. Active recall: you remember what you practise pulling out of memory, not what you read again. Spacing: reviews spread over days last far longer than the same time spent in one session. Everything else, like routes, scores and the mountain, is there to make doing those two things a bit more fun.

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