By Christina Ko
Northwood High School
Grade 10___Cramming, or, as R. Somner put it, “a period of neglect of study followed by a concentrated burst of studying immediately before an exam,” is a frequent practice among students; according to a 2008 study by Shelby H. McIntyre and J. Michael Munson, 25 to 50 percent of students cram for exams.
Despite parents’ incessant remarks of disapproval, however, the practice seems impossible to stamp out, especially with schedules full to the brim with advanced courses and various extracurricular activities and the plethora of time-wasters such as the Internet teenagers have access to and the strange sense of pride and satisfaction that follows a good exam grade as a result of last-minute studying. Putting an end to cramming once and for all would be an infinitely wise decision, however, as studies have shown that staying up late to squash in information the night before tests is unhealthy and ineffective in the long run.
In 2001, Harvard Medical School conducted an experiment with two groups – one control group that slept regularly for four days and another that was deprived of sleep the first night but resumed a normal sleeping schedule for the remainder of the experimental period. After four days, the groups were tested on image recollection. The control group with the normal sleeping cycle outperformed the other, because sleep deprivation – even just over an hour less than a normal slumber – negatively impacts the cortex, the part of the brain that stores information. In addition, according to Jennifer Carson, wellness prevention specialist and stress management educator atUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s McKinley Health Center, “cramming builds stress and intensity,” neither of which is welcome in anyone’s life.
Several sources illustrate the long-term ineffectiveness of crash studying. In August 2007, bi-monthly journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, stated that cramming all the information on a single topic into one study session made the information less likely to be retained by the brain. Nicholas Cepeda, professor of psychology at York University, echoed this fact in November 2007, saying “the compression of learning into a too-short period is very likely to produce misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery that will not survive the passage of substantial periods of time.”
So instead of pulling an all-nighter the night before a test and stomaching parents’ flood of disapproving remarks, try spacing out study sessions and revisiting material every few months for long-term retention. Your brain – and your ears – will thank you.
