November 25, 2007

Perhaps it is time to banish all-night study and replace it with quality and consistent study practices all the year round writes Naureen Aqueel

WHEN semester exams approach in colleges and universities, tensions begin to mount and warning bells ring in the heads of many students. Those known as ‘party-animals’ lock themselves up in their rooms and can be found buried in their books. Worse still, many students will spend the night before each exam sipping coffee or tea, in an attempt to force themselves to stay up in order to complete the syllabus. This phenomenon known as the ‘Pre-exam all-nighter’ is a fairly common study technique used by students today. Students deliberately deprive themselves of sleep before exams and stay up all (or most part) of the night studying, revising and cramming their heads with information. This lack of sleep is rarely made up for even in the day time, because a major part of their day is spent commuting to and from the exam venue, giving the exam and then maybe preparing for the next, if they are among the unfortunate ones who have consecutive exams in a row.

So, why is it that students resort to this method of preparing for exams?

Some students find night-time to be the best time to study, primarily because it is a peaceful and tranquil time and there are no distractions. For Reema Dada, a top student of her class at a business institute, staying up during exams or to meet deadlines is a common practice. “I find it quite effective, especially because in the day there are a thousand other things to do,” she says. “A couple of hours of sleep is good enough but, despite that, the mornings aren’t all that great. I have to come back from the exam and sleep a couple of hours.”

However, the benefits of studying at night-time are not usually the reason why students stay up preparing for an exam the very next day. Many students go without much quality sleep throughout the period exams last. And this is not just because they prefer studying at night, for, they could very well make up for that sleep during the day. It is more because they feel overburdened with work, since they had been procrastinating studying till the last moment.

“I hate staying up to study primarily because I am a morning person and simply can not study at night. But since I am also a procrastinator, hence I do end up studying at the last moment, which leads to fatigue in the morning and I usually end up forgetting whatever I had studied,” admits Aasiya Abdul Rauf, a graduate of one of Pakistan’s business institutes. “Personally speaking, I am not in favour of this technique but it works for my friends. For me, the best time to study is after fajr prayers, as I retain more at that time.”

Some of the popular attributes amongst students are: being disorganised, procrastinating and just having no concern for studies until the exam date-sheet knocks them into their senses. Naturally then, they have to spend their days and nights studying to make up for all the precious hours they wasted.

“I don’t use this technique often, but sometimes I do have to stay up the night before an exam,” says Hina Salim, a university student enrolled in a social science degree. “When I stay up the night just before the exam, I am a bit stressed. This helps at times, to speed up my work. Sometimes, I get the work of several days done in one night, though the quality of the work isn’t always the best.” Although she does not recommend it, she is of the opinion that it works when the student has spent the entire year sleeping and just before the exam realises how much work he/she has to do. “I am forced to use this technique when I don’t do my work on its proper time.”

While staying up all night may be effective in helping a student complete the syllabus or assignment on time, how effective is it really in bringing good results?

For Ahmed Saya, who is studying privately for a professional degree and teaches at various schools in the morning, a pre-exam all-nighter is an absolute ‘no-no’. “I once did this but it was a bad experience as I was drowsy the next day and could not fully concentrate in the exam,” he says. “Staying up the whole night is bad for health, both physically and mentally. I believe this practice should be stopped immediately!”

Ahmed’s views are supported by those of many doctors and psychologists. Researchers have found that lack of sleep impairs the brain’s ability to store new information. Sleep is vital for consolidating recently-learned material in memory. The organisation or reorganisation of memory or the conversion of learned material into more permanent memory has been found to be taking place primarily during sleep. Therefore, students who take-off for the exam after an intense period of all-night study without any sleep are in great risk of forgetting or missing out in the exam on what they have so laboriously learned.

And that is not all. Recent research has found that sleep prior to learning is just as important to sleep after learning. So, there goes students’ hope for staying up studying for a long period only to have an hour or so of sleep just before the exam.

The journal Nature Neuroscience published research conducted by Matthew Walker and colleagues (2007) on the importance of sleep prior to learning. The study compared the performance of two groups on a learning task. One group had slept the previous night as usual and the other group had gone about 36 hours without sleep. They were shown a series of pictures of people, landscapes and objects to remember. After two days, when everyone had had two nights of normal sleep, the participants were shown more pictures and they had to identify which they had been shown two days earlier. The group that had not slept before the learning task recognised nineteen percent fewer pictures. The researchers concluded sleep prior to learning was very important to retain learned material for later.

Therefore, burning the midnight oil to complete their syllabus is not such a good idea for students who want to succeed in their exams and learn something from their degrees. In order to truly learn something students must read, study and practice consistently throughout the semester. Nida Iqbal Umer, a medical student at a private college sums it up quite aptly: “I think it is better if you sleep well and wake up early and revise. And this will only work if you have been studying all the year round and not just before exams.”