Studying for midterms: a 2-week or 7-day plan

Where to start? The inventory of UE and coefficients

In a bachelor’s degree, each teaching unit (UE) gets a coefficient and a number of credits. The French decree of July 30, 2018 on the national bachelor’s degree (arrêté du 30 juillet 2018 relatif au diplôme national de licence) requires the scale of coefficients to be consistent with that of credits, and leaves each institution to set its own compensation rules. This information is in your program’s knowledge assessment rules: it’s the first document to open.

Don’t build your plan on the hope that a good grade will make up for an abandoned UE. Compensation rules vary from one program to another: read them, then aim for the pass mark in each UE.

• The UE and its chapters, as the teacher announced them.
• Its coefficient and its credits.
• The exam format: long written, multiple-choice, case study, oral, or continuous assessment already earned.
• The date and time of the exam.
• Your current level, from 1 (to redo) to 3 (mastered), estimated after a test question rather than by gut feeling.

How do you sort a PDF handout that’s too long?

A handout contains the whole course, but not everything in it has the same weight. Spot what the teacher emphasized: the outline, the notions revisited in tutorials, the examples developed in the lecture hall, the points announced for the exam. Then rank each chapter by what it asks of you: recalling definitions and rules, explaining a mechanism or redoing exercises.

For each important chapter, a short sheet is enough if it helps you test yourself. Fichea can create a structured sheet from your PDF; compare it with the handout before learning it, because a generated summary can leave out a condition or an exception. Exercise chapters are mostly worked by redoing the tutorial exercises without looking at the correction.

Two-week midterm study plan

This plan assumes about six UE and full days of work. Adapt the number of days per UE to its coefficient and to your level; the times are suggestions.

Every day, start with five or ten minutes of questions on the day before. These short recalls keep the first UE you studied fresh while you move on to the next ones.

• Day 1: inventory of the UE, sorting the handouts, half-day schedule.
• Days 2 to 9: one or two UE per day. In the morning, learn a chapter and prepare your sheet; in the afternoon, answer questions without notes and redo exercises; in the evening, spend 15 minutes reviewing your mistakes.
• Days 10 to 12: one past exam per day under time limits, followed by its detailed correction.
• Day 13: go back over all the mistakes noted since the start, UE by UE.
• Day 14: a light session on the UE of the first exam, preparing your equipment, bedtime at the usual hour.

Midterms in a week: the emergency 7-day version

With seven days, you won’t be able to review everything in detail, and it’s better to decide that on the first day. Keep the UE with the highest coefficients as a priority and then, in each one, the central notions of the outline and the tutorials. Isolated details come after.

Even in an emergency, protect your nights. Exams often follow one another over several days, and a week without sleep leaves you no time to recover between two exams.

• Day 1: quick inventory and choice of the priority chapters in each UE.
• Days 2 to 5: each day, a heavy UE in the morning and a lighter UE in the afternoon, with a test without notes at the end of each block.
• Day 6: a past exam or a tutorial subject under time limits on the heaviest UE.
• Day 7: go back over the week’s mistakes and write the outline of each chapter from memory.

Past exams, multiple-choice quizzes and orals: practicing the exam format

Past exams show the type of questions and the level expected. Ask your UFR for them or look on your program’s online platform, and check that they match this year’s syllabus. Work through them under time limits and without notes, then correct yourself with the course rather than with an answer key of unknown origin.

Practice multiple-choice quizzes help check definitions, distinctions and conditions. The review by Dunlosky and his colleagues, published in 2013, ranks practice testing among the most useful learning techniques. Read the explanation of each answer, including when you found the right one by chance.

For an oral, practice speaking. Pick a question from the course, prepare an outline in five minutes, then answer out loud for three minutes while recording yourself. When you listen back, your hesitations show the passages you recognize without knowing how to explain them.

Worked example: a contract law question

Imagine a law of obligations midterm in the second year of a bachelor’s degree. Your handout is up to date, but an old sheet picked up from a previous year still talks about “object” and “cause” for the conditions of validity of a contract.

A well-built multiple-choice quiz brings out this trap: you recognize all the words, but only one option matches the text in force. When a document is old, check the version of the article on Légifrance before learning it.

Frequently asked questions