Name: If You Study Like This, You’ll FAIL (Backed by Science)
Uploaded: 2025-10-01T01:22:02.000Z
Duration: 17 min 10 s
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If you study like this, you'll fail because these four common mistakes destroy even the smartest student and you're probably doing at least one right now.

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You know that feeling of spending days studying only to end up with the same grade as that friend who shows up to exam day and says, I didn't even study?

You sacrifice all your free time, skip hanging out with friends, don't play video games, give up on your social life, and in the end, your grades are still average while your friends are out there having fun.

And to make things worse, studying takes up so much time and energy that you start procrastinating, which just makes everything 10 times worse.

But here's the thing, you're not the problem.

It's the slow, time-consuming, and incorrect way you've been studying that's stealing your time and your life.

I'm not going to tell you to flow state or start time-blocking your study sessions because that only works for some people.

In this video, I'm going to share four study mistakes that every average student makes that will save you time and get you straight A's.

Mistake four is the most important, so stick around for that.

But for now, mistake number one, stop studying in order.

You're an idiot if you start at chapter one.

You sit down, open your textbook to chapter one and work through it page by page like a good little robot.

Well, congratulations on wasting half your study time, idiot.

Your brain doesn't give a damn about the logical order professors put material in.

That's designed for teaching, not for your specific knowledge gaps.

The brutal reality, you already know 40 to 50% of what's in that textbook from other classes, common knowledge, or previous exposure, but you're restudying it anyway because it's in order.

Meanwhile, the 20% you actually don't know, the stuff that'll wreck your grade, gets rushed at the end when you're exhausted.

A scientist named Robert Bjork found that interleaving, which is just mixed studying, forces students to notice and process the similarities and differences among things they're trying to learn, leading to better long-term retention.

Start with practice questions or the exam study guide.

Identify what you can't answer, then study only those gaps.

Everything else, you're literally wasting time reviewing material that won't improve your grade one bit.

Mistake number two, reviewing your correct answers.

Stop studying what you already got right, idiot.

You do a practice test, get some questions right, some wrong, then what do you do?

You review everything, including the ones you got right.

Just to make sure I really understand, don't be an idiot.

Questions you got right don't improve your grade.

Reviewing them is like a basketball player practicing shots they already make 100% of the time instead of working on their weaknesses.

If you got 15 out of 20 questions right and spent equal time reviewing all 20, you just wasted 75% of your review time on stuff that won't change your grade.

Two scientists, Karpiker and Roediger, found that students using active recall performed significantly better on retention tests than those who simply reviewed notes.

The students who studied only the things they didn't know could remember 57% of what they learned, but kids who reviewed everything could only remember 29%.

Only study your mistakes and the questions you guessed on.

Every wrong answer goes in there with why you got it wrong.

Correct answers, never look at them again, you idiot.

Studying before you know what's actually on the test, you're studying blindfolded.

You crack open your textbook and start studying everything, every concept, every detail, every example.

You mark it with your cute yellow highlighter, because surely it's all important, right?

Professors test maybe 20 to 30% of the material they teach, but you're studying 100% of it, because you don't know which 20 to 30% matters.

It's like preparing for a marathon by also training for swimming and cycling.

You spend 20 hours mastering every detail, when six hours focused on what's actually tested would have gotten you the same grade.

Studies show that students who figure out the most important stuff first do way better than kids who try to learn everything.

Research on smart studying proves that when kids focus on what will be on the test, they get better grades and study for less time.

Before studying anything, get the test blueprint.

Past exams, study guides, ask the professor directly what's covered.

Even ask your friends who have already taken the class about the exams.

If it's not on the test, it doesn't exist.

Your grade doesn't reward you for knowing extra material that wasn't tested.

These mistakes make you feel productive because you're putting in the hours, but hours mean nothing if you're studying the wrong things, in the wrong order, using methods that don't actually create memory.

Stop being busy and start being effective, you idiot.

Mistake number four, rereading instead of self-testing.

Students studying by reading the same chapter over and over again, highlighting different colors each time, putting pretty sticky notes on the page and feeling productive as hell, while learning absolutely nothing.

The brutal truth, rereading is not studying.

You read chapter five about the immune system.

Feels familiar the second time through, so you think, I'm getting it.

You've convinced yourself you're learning, but you're not, you idiot.

You're just getting better at recognizing words on a page.

Congratulations, you just wasted two hours, genius.

Your brain confuses familiarity with knowledge.

I've seen this before, feels exactly like I know this, but seeing and knowing are completely different mental processes.

This is why you show up to your exams and brain fart when the test starts.

Research done by Psychological Science tested 10 different ways to study.

They found that rereading and highlighting are all low utility methods.

Rereading your notes ranks as one of the most ineffective ways to learn.

Students spend four to five hours rereading chapters, then sit down for the test and realize they can't actually recall anything.

They recognize the information when they see it, but can't produce it on demand.

That's called passive recognition, and it's worth exactly zero points on your exam.

Every 10 minutes of reading or watching, close everything and write down what you remember by hand.

You need to test that segment a different way, not just reread it like an idiot.

If you can't explain it without looking, you haven't learned it, period.

Three hours of rereading might feel like studying, but you retain maybe 10%.

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If You Study Like This, You’ll FAIL (Backed by Science)

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immune

pretend

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