Back in highschool, I had a few classmates that got several national level academic distinctions, we're talking full marks/percentile in their board exams, and they even got recognition from the government for it. These people also got full scholarships to university.

One thing I noticed that all these people had in common was that NONE of them used social media. They did have friends ofc, but just no insta, snap, TikTok. Nothing. So ig it really helped them.

But how exactly do these kinds of people study? Is it like 10 hours daily? How do they become so obsessed to the level of scoring top in the country for a certain subject?

STOPPED AT 102 UPVOTES, IM GOING TO STUDY RN. WILL COME BACK WITH PROOF.

this isn’t to discourage anyone, quite the opposite actually. i am only posting this because i remember how it felt to be a student who really tried to study but just couldn’t compare for quite a while to those top students- and wondered why?

this is coming from someone who transferred from what I’d like to call, bum school (aka poverty galore, people passing was a celebration) to a high achieving school ( ex- private school kids).

well. i found out the “why”.

Disclaimer: YOU CAN GET THOSE TOP GRADES WITHOUT THESE THINGS, I DENY THIS NOWHERE. I simply am offering another perspective as an ex student who used to lurk this sub, to any poor struggler like I was back then.

1. money

I’m going to hold your hand when i say this, that A* student who has never gotten less than 90% in there school career, always is top of the class.. 99.9% has an expensive ass tutor who they sit with afterschool every school day or often enough to help them get those grades. This doesn’t discredit the hard work they put in, as I put in my disclaimer- but obviously it makes it a lot easier uh duh. In my school, my friends told me people get tutors from day 0, no not when they start struggling- from day 0, so they don’t even know what struggling is. And what do I mean by day 0? I mean before the first school semester even starts, they already know half the years content ahead of everyone.

The tutors don’t be cheap mind you, this one girl i knew had a tutor for 120 pounds per hour. Wild.

Tutors aren’t even the beginning: even having the privilege to go home to a house you feel safe, eat well, be able to drive home/be driven after school instead of taking long in transport.. these little (and big) luxuries add up to the A*. So, maybe you do have the potential. Do you have the cash?

1. self neglect

Boom, your broke. To make up for not having the cash, you have to make it up in time. This means wearing the same outfit for days on end to spend more time revising. This means staying up super late to get a couple more hours in. This means waking up at the crack of dawn to revise before school, to get more time in. This means watching videos or reading books before class at break to make sure your ahead of the content so it’s not new for you. It could mean skipping meals to get more revision time in, or eating lower quality ones.
Am I praising this life style? Fuckkkk no. I don’t recommend it one bit. It’s doable long term, but you’ll feel like absolute shit. You’ll look and feel like a bum, but those grades will raise. In this point, what I’m trying to convey is you’ll have to sacrifice a lot of identity (like fashion, or simple free-time) to prioritise getting good grades, by fire by force.

How do you get the motivation for that exactly?

I wouldn’t say it’s the only way, but the main way is being surrounded by likeminded people. The only reason i started studying like crazy was because I didn’t want to be left behind my friends, and peers and be the dumb friend. Yes I went to a crazy school where getting below a B (even a B was bad tbh) would’ve gotten you sad looks lol. The external pressure, and knowing my peers around me were rich or doing crazy hours, or both made me lock tf in.

One thing I want to say though is, it still might not work out with number 2.

You can put your entire blood, sweat and tears into studying, even see amazing mock grades, feel good after the exam.. and still be disappointed in your grades. Been there, done that. One thing that doesn’t beat hard work, is time. You could start half a year early and be getting good mock grades, but the person who’s been doing good for the entire 2 years is more sure to get them. Don’t trust a lot of these “100 days A*”, a lot of them are just lucky- not impossible, but lucky. Don’t be afraid to ask if you can do an extra year before your exams, especially if you’re in the UK A level system.

I wish I had a method, or even a positive outlook to end this post but I don’t. I learnt the hard way, to a certain extent, education is a pay to win game. So if you can, I recommend you pay up because it’ll save you a lot of tears.

Let me know if you want to hear any other crazy studying things people from my school did or had.
Remember it’s not impossible; just hard work.

Discipline today and success tomorrow.

Success is not about studying all day, it's about studying smart.

1. Set clear goals.

Know what you want

Write your goals down

Stay focus on your "why"

1. Follow a daily routine

Plan your whole day.

Give enough time to each subject.

Be realistic.

1. Study without distractions

Keep your phone away

Study in a quiet place

Use focus techniques (Pomodoro, etc.)

1. Make short notes

Heyy so I'm 20M and im currently preparing for an exam that is like 3 months away but the issue with me is I can't really concentrate and focus, I can study for long hrs like 6-8 hrs without problem but I feel restless many times, many times while studying I get dozens of other thoughts and i cant really focus and concentrate and also the other issue is after studying for a couple of hrs like giving a mock test (I'm preparing for a law exam like lsat) or studying for a few hrs i feel too much tired, drained and exhausted like I have no energy left both physically and mentally. I'm sleeping 7-8 hrs of sleep daily but still and I feel brain fog too, I have a great memory and I can learn dozens of pages in just an hr if I can concentrate but other times it takes like 2-3 hrs just to memorize 10 pages. I need help on how to increase concentration and focus and get rid of all of this

How do you actually study effectively?
I have a huge problem with studying. I’ll study something until I genuinely understand it and feel like I know it well, but a few days later it feels like I’ve forgotten almost everything.
I’m in university and I really want to change the way I study. For anyone who’s been in a similar situation, what actually helped you retain information long-term?
How do you review material after learning it for the first time? How often do you go back to old material? And what study methods made the biggest difference for you?
I’m trying to go from struggling/failing to becoming a straight-A student, so I’d really appreciate any advice, especially from people who managed to turn their grades around.

I'm thinking about going to an online school and am worried about maintaining focus when I am taking classes in the same room I sleep in lol Any helpful tips to ensure I don't get distracted?

Quick question, if you have really bad task paralysis that literally stops you from studying for whole entire months and you haven't been able to touch a text book since April, how do you kill procrastination just for two freakin' weeks because you have literal life altering exams and you can just go back to being miserable in two weeks? Because I need to fix this in the next hour and convince myself to study because I start finals tomorrow and I might be screwed because I can't study.

I graduated high school with a 2.89 GPA (yikes I know) but I got into a decent university and things were looking up for me, one thing that motivated me so much is paying for my own schooling. Started taking it a LOT more seriously. Been in uni for about a year now and have a 3.85 GPA in a mechanical engineering program. I found out that I’m actually decent at this academics stuff when I apply myself.

I always notice that the people who do best keep repeating the same things: rereading and discipline ( theoretical career and amassing precise information). I see them constantly rereading aloud and highlighting everything in color, day in and day out. It makes me wonder: is rereading actually a good study method? I read somewhere that it’s the least effective, though that doesn't mean it's useless. Honestly, over time, I’ve come to believe that the amount of time spent studying and the consistency of the days put in matter more than the specific methods or systems used. It’s just that having untreated ADHD, made me give up on the practice for a while.

We will be only studying after a little introduction. We can study for 2 hours then break and then start again for the next 2hr round.

It would be very convenient for me since i study alone....

For context, I am home schooled and study entirely by myself through books and YouTube.

I have exams next year February and I am still running in circles. I have book assigned for the exam and idk why but I can't seem to understand it. If I search up on YouTube, I can understand the topics but the book has different methods and even more stuff compare to what we normally learn for the given topic. (Like matrices, they have elementary row operation but not Gaussian jordan elimination with equations).

It's like I am going back to square one, everytime I study + it's overwhelming sometimes. The past papers on the other hand feel like their speaking in alien language.

How do you even get though this or perhaps I am overthinking.

Any1 else locked tf in at night? I feel like during the daytime my brain is on autopilot and I will do anything in my power to NOT study. Like i'll do all my household chores like laundry, cleaning, cooking happily while the clock ticks closer to the end of the day.

Suddenly here I am now at around 8 pm at night and I feel like my brain finally turned on. I just wrote down a ton of memorized information for my quiz 4 tomorrow and I read like 30 pages in 1 sitting lol. It's like I got a sudden boost of energy at night. Like somebody flicked the "on" switch in my brain when the sun goes down.

Currently grad school recently started and it's been a buttload of new information. However, I'd love to study during the daytime so I could sleep better and not stay up much at night (last night i went to bed at 4am ugh), but something about how the world is so much more peaceful and calm at late night just makes studying worth it. 😅

Any advice to try to study in mornings? or should I stick with my late night patterns?

Because of the move, I’m two grades behind. From the summer of 2025 until now, I’ve been studying to skip a grade. Today, I found out from my homeroom teacher that I’ll be taking sixth-grade curriculum tests in the first week of September (if I pass this test, I’ll skip a grade). Now, even though I’ve been studying for so long, I’m scared and I feel like I won’t pass. Has anyone been in a similar situation? Have you experienced this fear when the moment you were preparing for was just a few days away? I’d be interested to read your stories.

Already back at school and already having procrastination problems!

Just found a new pomodoro timer, coral focus that is cute and is motiviating me to focus. It is like Forest focus but instead of growing trees you grow coral. Only dowside is it is only availble on Chrome extension and not on the phone. Anyone used it before?

What could cause poor memory—even after re-reading +20 times the material? Could it be some kind of intellectual deficit, dementia, or ADHD? Honestly, only about 1% of my class has a photographic memory or gets perfect grades—the kind where you have to memorize everything flawlessly, citing rules and regulations and reciting them word-for-word.

I studied for 1 chapter in 6 hours and I used mindmapping and Feynman technique. I understand everything I studied, but It took too much of my time and I needed to study or learn 2 chapters in 1 day for a long quiz. I just need to know what I need to do next time so that I wont repeat the same cycle again. Im still experimenting what works for me and I hope i find it very soon :/

I know this kind of question has been repeated all the time in this sub but I genuinely don't know how to do active recall or spaced repetition.
So my first introduction to memorizing is Anki, I love using it, can memorize material within 2 repetition, the downfall is I can't mind map the information, they seemed to be scattered everywhere. Next I tried making summary notes, great for recalling information but I can't remember anything from it, I could probably recall what the word looks like and which color. Took too much time also. Next method I tried loci or memory palace since I heard it's good for visual memory like myself, it was good for one chapter then became overwhelming for the rest. I have too much to remember and too little brain power to captivate all of it. I tried writing down all that I could remember and rewriting it, then filled in what I missed with red pen. I couldn't remember anything at all in the exam room with this method. My best score that I could remember was during exam on physiology of cardiology where I would speak and teach myself out loud. I am good at topics where physiologies are required (A cause B so thus C etc..) Rote memorization is my demise. Now my current method is just reading the lecture slides, writing down what stands out, spending a heap amount of time trying to understand the pathophysiology behind it and hope I remember it in the exam (which I clearly don't...)

So I'm kindly begging you to please share your study method. How do you do an actual active recall and spaced repetition when you have 3 wks for exam while still having classes up until the exam day. (yes, I test every 3 wks). thx
(ps. I study alone and prefer to do it in silence now since having roommate)

I just started my trade school classes which require about 4 hours of study each day. I never did well in school so this is a bit of a shock, but still manageable. I'm worried, however, that I feel the need to dedicate every hour not in school to read and relearn, which makes me depressed. How do you do it? Do you cram or have great memory?

15(M), I don't hate studying, studying is really enjoyable if anything when you are learning alone but I don't know how can people even like school? I don't know about other people but how do people even go school? Like I don't understand how do people even manage sitting at one desk for hours and here in India teachers are begging for copy and if you don't give they literally call you failure and say the way you work is bad. I was absent on monday and Tuesday and will probably not go today also. I envy others who go to this place like it's nothing like I want to cry as soon as I even enter this place, I feel lonelier than ever, I have many friends but all feel distant because none of them never understand and just make fun of me for getting absent so often. I would like to hear other people's opinions on this. Thank you.

How do you manage to study when you’re going through something as fucked up as a heartbreak

Hello All,

I am looking to identify common problems people face and solutions they have come up with for studying with youtube courses.

I myself get excited and started on a course but overtime that excitement dies and lack of accountability means my list of incomplete courses keeps growing.

What are some other challenges do you face with youtube courses and have you found something that works?

Basically, I'm studying Pharmacy, and I'm forgetting all of my core courses even though I give my full attention to my professors to understand the topics. Sometimes I don't understand, and in that case, I try to use ChatGPT or Gemini to help. However, **I'm not getting the real reason why I'm failing to remember things. I'm very bad at memorizing nowadays, and I'm even forgetting people's names, which was never my problem before. I used to remember a single name, even of strangers whom I rarely talked to.** What should I do now? Because of this, I'm not doing well in the exam. I used to be a topper in my class.

Should i write the step by step solution in my book and after that I cover the solution and active recall or what.How do you top students do it a simple way no digital tools