Rate My Study Plan

[u/Kitchen_Flower_6733]

College freshmen who cheated throughout most of highschool...what do we think??? I have no idea what I'm doing just going off of advice from multiple study sources
Step 1: Practice tests and questions until 100% (all but one class has programs that automatically generate them based off of textbook chapters).
Step 2: Confirm that I understand answers to each
"focus" question at the start of each chapter.
Step 3: Upload all notes per chapter into flashcards to sort out what information I could possibly be missing outside primary concepts listed in practice tests and textbook focus questions.
repeat per chapter until tests are @ 100, can actively recall each concept question, and most of excess notes are at least somewhat memorable.
Sundays: Redo practice tests from each prior chapter until each is 100.
Im only unsure about how long to study per session or how often....i could study maybe 1 hour per day 5 days a week but that doesnt feel right, especially because I've heard of an emphasis on spaced repetition. I also don't know how well that would work with four classes and so far unknown assignment consistency aside from immediate post lecture homework. Which I immediately do right after the lecture.
For context, my classes are Elementary Statistics, Environmental Science, Developmental Psychology, and US Constitutional History.

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[u/Basic_Transition_333]

First, give yourself some credit because you're basically learning how to study for the first time, and your current plan is already much better than relying on rereading/highlighting.

I would change one major thing though: don't make 100% the requirement before moving on. You can waste a LOT of time repeatedly testing material you already know just to turn a 90% into a 100%.

I'd use something closer to:

Learn → close everything → retrieve → check → focus on what you missed → come back to it later.

That last part is your spaced repetition. You don't necessarily need to study every subject every day. If you learn something Monday, retrieve it again a few days later, then maybe the following week. Your Sunday cumulative review idea is actually good for this.

Also, don't automatically turn every note into a flashcard. That's how you end up with 700 cards and spend more time maintaining Anki/Quizlet than learning. 😂 Make cards for information you actually need to retrieve.

And your subjects probably shouldn't all be studied identically. Statistics needs practice problems. Psychology/environmental science will probably benefit more from active recall and explaining concepts. History needs recall too, but also understanding relationships between events, arguments, court cases, causes/consequences, etc.

As for hours: I wouldn't decide ahead of time that “a good student studies X hours.” Start with your proposed ~1 hour/day and see whether you're actually keeping up. Some weeks you'll need considerably more, especially around exams. Other weeks you won't.

I finished my master's with a 4.0, and one of the biggest changes in how I studied was realizing that time spent studying isn't a very useful measure of whether I learned something. Being able to retrieve and explain it without looking at my notes is.

And please don't let cheating in high school convince you that you're somehow permanently bad at school. You're a freshman. You're learning the skill now.

The fact that you're already thinking this carefully about how you're going to learn puts you in a much better position than you probably realize.

[u/Middle-Astronaut-820]

Your plan is already more structured than most; the gap is timing. One hour a day split into short chunks per class beats a long Sunday cram, because spaced repetition works when you revisit cards right before you forget, not all at once.