As final exams approach very quickly some people tend to procrastinate more than others. For some, the pressure of passing all of your classes can be very intense and stressful if you wait till last minute to study and try to prepare yourself for them. I, myself procrastinate very often and I always try to cram everything in at last minute; or more like five minutes before the assignment supposed to be turned in. So here I will tell you four helpful tips to become more prepared for finals that are just right around the corner.

• Be organized

The first and most important tip is to stay organized! A few weeks after school starts you start you notice all the papers you’ve gotten from every class, every day. It’s a lot… I know; but the easiest way to handle all the papers is to get binders or folders, label them with what class they belong to and put all your papers in there. When you get your graded papers back I recommend to look through them and the assignments you think won’t help you in the future, like on a test or

quiz just throw them away. I do this every few weeks and it makes my binders so much lighter and it helps me become a little more organized than I was before.

• Study guides and notes
  

One thing I can’t say enough is to keep ALL of your study guides and also keep most if not all of your notes throughout the semester! Through the three years I’ve been at CCHS I’ve found that keeping all of your study guides is what makes final exams so much easier. A lot of the final exam study guides that teachers give out are almost the same if not identical to a lot of the questions from previous study guides from tests and quizzes. With notes, for example in a math class; you may not remember the formula for certain types of problems or just overall forgot how to do some things. So that’s where keeping notes comes to be handy, you can flip back to the beginning of a notebook and see everything that was written down from that section and refresh your memory on some things.

• Highlighting

A thing I think that seems to help from personal experience is highlighting things. Obviously, having something highlighted automatically attracts the eye to it. So the more you look at something the more you’ll most likely remember it. Some things to highlight are like, definitions, facts, names of important people and just overall things that could possibly be on the test and look important. Another thing is to not stick to one color highlighter, change it up a bit. The more creative or pretty and non-sloppy it looks the more likely you are to want to read it and the easier it is to be organized. I also like color coordinating things into certain categories. For example, for facts i’d use yellow, for names i’d use purple, for definitions i’d use orange and so on. Highlighting is just an easy way to point out the obvious things that need to be studied more and memorized.

• Put down the phone..  
  

The last tip is to just put your phone down. Yes, I know it sounds impossible but how does if feel to think you could’ve just like 30 minutes out of your day to study a section for a class that you’re worried about and feel a little more confident with after. But instead you took that 30 minutes and watched another episode of Grey’s Anatomy. You don’t have to spend hours upon hours of studying, in fact it’s good to take little breaks here and there, to get some water and food and to let your mind just chill and de-stress for a few minutes. Little study sessions where you’re completely focused are way better that a six hour study session where you’re distracted every five minutes with your phone.

Believe it or not according to PRNewswire, “asked approximately 1,300 high school and college students about their study habits. The findings show that procrastination is widespread, with 87 percent saying they procrastinate”. If you want to keep yourself on top of things at CCHS you can check your grades here. Also if you would like to order your transcript to see how many credits you currently have and your past grades you can order it here.