Just before exams, almost every student feels overwhelmed by the sheer volume of study material they need to memorize.  In some cases, they start feeling that their brain will burst due to pressure (not literally). When this happens, there is no need to panic as there is a smart way available that helps you to condense important text, and identify essential points for better comprehension.

In this blog post, we will be discussing that smart way in complete detail, so stick around with us till the very end.

What’s the Smartest Way to Revise Study Material Just Before Exams?

Although, there are numerous effective ways available to revise the study material just a few hours before the final exam. However, the one that will save you time valuable time and effort is Summarizing.

It is basically a writing technique that is solely used to quickly grasp the main idea of lengthy information by extracting key points or details. This will eliminate the need for you to read each and every detail from start to end.

There are two types of summarizations:

  • Extractive: In this type, a summary is created by using the same words and phrases that the original text contains. 
  • Abstractive: Whereas, abstractive summarization has the opposite requirement. It involves summarizing the text using new words and phrases that the source text does not contain. 

It is worth noting that academic experts recommend students to always summarize study material in their own words. Doing so will greatly contribute to a better understanding of the information and strong retention. 

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How Summarization is Done?

You will not have much time when exams are at the door, this clearly means you cannot afford manual summarization. To speed up the process students must opt for online solutions. The internet is filled with a variety of text summarizing tools; some of them perform extractive, while some work using the abstractive approach. 

You can go with the one that matches your specific needs and preferences. But in this guide, we have picked Summarizer.org (https://www.summarizer.org/). It performs abstractive summarization and was ranked well in the Google results. Let’s enter a lengthy essay in the tool to see how it would generate a summary by only using the main points.

Now, let’s head towards our main topic. 

How Summarizing Study Text Can Be Helpful for Quick Revision

There are multiple ways through which text summarization can prove beneficial for quick revision of study material before exams. Some of the major ones are discussed below.

  • Identification of Key Points for Better Comprehension.

We all know that strong comprehension is the key to success in exams, and summarizing techniques can help in improving it. Let us explain how this would work. 

Text summarization helps students quickly grasp the most important details from learning material without being bogged into unnecessary details. 

Additionally, when they further condense those points into a brief summary using their own words the overall understanding of that topic will ultimately increase, resulting in a stronger knowledge foundation.

  • Active Recall for Boosted Memory

When you summarize a piece of text, it means you are actively recalling the information that has previously learned from your memory. Active recalling is a powerful technique that has been proven more effective in revision as compared to just simply skimming the information. 

So by actively recalling the essential details through summarization, students will have the opportunity to further strengthen their neurological connections with it. This will increase the likelihood of easily recalling all the revised data during the exam.

  • Time-Saving

This is obvious… Students cannot afford to read each chapter from start to end to gain understanding due to lack of time. This is where summarizing acts as a lifesaver for them. It will help students to only focus on the most important details without wasting much time. 

They can just take an overview of the summaries of each chapter, and grasp the key ideas or messages that they cover. With this approach, students can easily revise a bunch of chapters in a short span of time.

Ending Note

Revising all the study text just before exams is crucial for every student. But to make the revision process quicker and easier, they should adopt a smart approach which is summarizing their academic material. 

This can prove really handy for them in multiple ways. This blog post explained those ways in detail; we hope you will find this article informative.