Exam time can be one of the more stressful periods of the school year. Studying can be one of the most stressful aspects of the whole process. Trying to remember and then memorize everything you learned in the class throughout the whole year can be a difficult task, but it can be manageable. The psychology behind studying can be a more intricate process than it might feel like at the time of studying though.

Studying starts with motivation. You have to want to study in order for it to be effective most of the time. For most people, an incentive helps with this process. An incentive, in this case, is the score you want to receive on the exam. That score pushes you to study in order to get the best score you can possibly get. In order to study effectively, you should practice different methods of encoding information. These methods can include visual encoding, acoustic encoding, and semantic encoding. Imagery is also a helpful aid when it comes to studying terms. You can also use mnemonics and the process of chunking to your benefit to make things easier to recover.

The process of studying is the stressor that we appraise as threatening or challenging. This stressor leads to our body’s adaptive response to the stress in three phases. These phases include alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. These phases are what makes it difficult to study for most people. Problems with studying or repetitive bad performance can also lead to learned helplessness, which will make studying seem like a lost cause.

Your memory also plays an important part in taking an exam. Problems with encoding, storage, and retrieval can affect your performance on an exam. Everything you have learned or have been studying continuously should hopefully be stored in your long-term memory. If not, it’ll be a challenge to know that information during the exam. The information you learned last will be the easiest for you to remember due to the serial position effect.

Nature-nurture also plays a part in AP exams. Your genes and your environment can both play a part in your overall performance, which means that the outcome isn’t ultimately your fault. Just remember that AP tests are supposed to measure the content validity of what you have learned all year. They are not a measure of your overall intelligence.