Tracking your results is essential. It allows you to guide your learning by highlighting weaknesses, telling you how effective your study is and demonstrating how well you are progressing. This will ultimately build your confidence and motivation by reinforcing your progress and demonstrating how beneficial your studying is.
Tracking is essential to assessing your studying technique. In my experience, a large majority of students I have met do not objectively assess their study methods by repeatedly testing their knowledge and tracking their results. Often, the first indication a student has as the whether their method of study is effective is when they sit the exam that they have been preparing for. The simple act of finding a test to mimic the exam and repeatedly sitting that between study sessions can give you the feedback you need to assess and adapt how you learn on the go to achieve the highest grade you are capable of when the actual exam arrives.
Tracking will demonstrate your weaknesses and the gaps in your knowledge. You don’t know what you don’t know until you test yourself. By testing and tracking your results, you can identify your weaknesses, attack them with study, and then retest until they become your strengths.
Demonstrated progress is addictive. There are many perfect examples in other areas of life where seeing your progress will motivate you to continue striving. For example, a runner who sees their 10k time creeping down race to race will be motivated to push harder in each training session. They may not enjoy the process of training or working hard, but the achievement at the end will encourage them to push on, and they will enjoy it as a result. The video game player who sees their video game character levelling up and developing new abilities will receive that positive reinforcement that their hours of playing are leading to greater achievements, spurring them on to put more hours into playing the game. Or the musician trying to learn a difficult piece on the piano. The longer they work at it, the more naturally it comes and the better the music sounds. This reinforcement encourages them to keep practising until they perfect the piece. The same is true of medicine. If a student sets out tracking their progress through a series of reproducible tests, the progress they will see will act as positive reinforcement of how effective their study is, encouraging them to put more time and effort into studying to bring their scores up even more.
This section is here to guide you through the process of using Zero To Finals to track your revision and learning process. Follow the simple steps below for a bulletproof method that I have developed and used again and again since my A-levels to consistently achieve fantastic grades in any exam. The reason it is so powerful is that it tells you what you otherwise wouldn’t know. It tells you instantly how much revision you have done, what topics you have covered, what topics you know well and what topics you really need to work on. It also tells you before you even sit the exam whether you are going to do well in it or not. Once you have achieved a certain level of competence across all topic areas, you can sit back and rest assured that when your results come out, they will reflect all the hard work you put in.
Step 1. Create a Tracking Table
Create a tracking table on excel, numbers or even on a sheet of paper. You need to include topics down the side, and attempts across the top. The objective is to record the dates that you review a topic and the score that you achieve when you test yourself on that topic.
If you would like to take it a step further and have the time, then you could create a column to allows you to record results of a practise test you take prior to studying the topic. The intention of this would be to get a baseline of your knowledge before you learn a topic, and by comparing these results to the test you take after studying the topic you can see how effective your learning session was.
Step 2. The Testing Sandwich
Use the testing sandwich to test your knowledge before and after studying each topic.
Step 3. Record your results in your tracking table.
Find the section of the table that corresponds to the correct topic and the correct attempt. Use Attempt 1 for your first attempt. Once you have already been through it once, had a break from that topic and come back to it again, you can move on to Attempt 2 (and so on).
It is important to record the date that attempt was made so that you have a reference point in the future to see how long it has been since you previously studied that topic (useful for spacing your topics effectively).
Record your percentage grade in the corresponding box.
Step 4. Take a break and repeat steps 2-4 for another topic
It is useful to space your study sessions for a particular topic out over time. For example, if you study cardiology once, it is worth studying some other topics for a while before coming back to study cardiology again. Try to space your study sessions for a particular topic out over time as well. This will help you to establish a more robust and longer-lasting memory and understanding of that topic.
Step 5. Watch your tracking table grow over time
This is a fantastic feeling because you can see visually exactly how much work you have done, how many times you have been through each topic, where your strengths and weaknesses are and what topics you can relax about and what topics you should be focusing on. Use your tracking table to guide your revision schedule and efforts.