WE’VE all done it. But does cramming work and what are the repercussions of cramming versus doing paced studying over a longer course of time?

No, it’s not really hyperbole to suggest that we have all done it. One study reported that 99 per cent of students have admitted to cramming at some point while they were in school.

Maybe you’ve had great success with cramming and maybe you’ve been warned by a teacher that it doesn’t help you learn things long-term, and it isn’t the best way to study. No matter what you’ve been told, it’s important to understand the trade-offs of cramming and how you can give yourself the best shot of making cramming work when you have to do it.

Let’s look at a few things we know:

1. A study at UCLA by Nate Kornell found that spacing out learning activities (studying) was more effective than cramming for 90 per cent of students. That means that overall, you’re better off spreading out the studying over a long period of time and doing it in smaller doses than one mega-blast of studying in a single night.

2)) Seventy per cent of students in that study believed that they actually knew more when cramming. A part of the reason they believed that may be found in the difference between recognising and remembering. Students feel like they recognise things on the test when they’ve crammed the night before, but that’s not actually the same as remembering. We tend to forget more and not know as much as we think we do when we cram.

3) A cramming 2012 study at UCLA suggests that cramming is actually counterproductive if it involves a loss of sleep. The study found that “regardless of how much a student generally studies each day, if that student sacrifices sleep time in order to study more than usual, he or she is likely to have more academic problems, not less, on the following day.”

While cramming is just necessary sometimes — either because you have too many tests at once, you’ve been on vacation, or you just plain forget to do your studying — there’s research that says spacing out your studying, at least a little, is going to help you commit the information to memory.

And when you have to cram for a test, be sure to get some sleep. Being alert and well rested the next day is going to help you more than you might expect.

— stemjobs.com