We’ve all been there: It’s the night before a big exam, a critical presentation, or a deadline, and suddenly you realize you’ve barely started preparing. Panic sets in, coffee brews by the gallon, and you dive into a marathon study session. This is cramming; the last-ditch effort to absorb months of material in hours. But does it actually work? Let’s unpack what science says about this high-pressure habit.
What Exactly Is Cramming?
Cramming is the practice of condensing large amounts of studying into a short period, often right before a test or deadline. It’s the opposite of spaced learning, where you review material over weeks or months. Students cram for many reasons: procrastination, busy schedules, or simply underestimating how much time they need. But is this sprint-style learning effective, or are we just fooling ourselves?
The Short-Term Win (and Long-Term Loss)
Let’s start with the good news: Cramming can work, sort of. If your goal is to pass tomorrow’s test, research shows that stuffing information into your brain overnight might help you scrape by. A 2009 study in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition found that students who crammed often performed similarly to those who studied gradually, on immediate tests. The catch? Their retention plummeted within days.
Think of your brain like a leaky bucket. Cramming pours water in quickly, but most of it drains out just as fast. When you study intensely for a short time, your brain prioritizes short-term memory. Without reinforcement, that information fades. So yes, you might remember enough to answer multiple-choice questions tomorrow, but ask yourself: What’s the point of learning if you forget it all next week?
The Science of Memory: Why Cramming Fails
Cramming is causing you to lose around 80% of what you believed you had learnt. Why? Because cramming does not establish a permanent relationship, it just stores information in short-term memory. Everything we process in our brain is temporarily stored in short-term memory. All of the unimportant things go there, such as what you wore on Monday and what you had for breakfast two days ago.
Thousands of bits of information bombard your brain. Anything that has not been moved to long-term memory is eventually “dumped.” As a result, the movie timings from last weekend also eliminate whatever construction codes you may have been cramming into your memory.
The remainder of your brain may not be able to reconstruct anything when you need it to, even if your short-term memory is engaged for five hours while you are studying.
Stress: The Silent Saboteur
You will be exhausted both on and before exam day if you stay up late cramming for the exam in the days and weeks prior. According to research, it is ineffective to sacrifice sleep for more study time. Your test-day performance may suffer if you give up sleep to study more than normal.
In addition to exhaustion, your body and mind will be under increased stress, which will compromise your immune system. Nobody wants to sit for an exam with a cold that they might have prevented in the first place!
When Cramming Might Be Unavoidable
If you are going to cram for your examinations, do it properly. Reading the textbook till you fall asleep at your desk due to weariness is probably not the ideal approach to prepare for an exam.
Create a list of what you need to learn before the exam. It is vital to be realistic about this; if you have left the revision till the last minute (e.g., the night before), it is likely too late to understand everything. It is essential to prioritize and update the most critical subjects appropriately, rather than trying to accomplish too much and then get overly excited.
Reviewing former paper questions is arguably the finest way to learn knowledge at the last minute. Speaking from personal experience, the knowledge I have learned in previous papers has always shown up in my university examinations, and it is an excellent method to learn a lot in a short amount of time.
Your institution will normally provide you with internet access to old papers (and occasionally answers), which may be an excellent source of revision while also helping you feel much more at ease regarding the paper’s arrangement.
Better Alternatives to Cramming
You would remember the material far better later on, say when it comes time to study for a final exam, if you spent an hour studying every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday rather than three hours the night before a test on Friday.
In a similar vein, the intervals between study sessions are advantageous when it comes to the material you study. Students were taught a wide range of mathematical concepts by researchers, including how to graph equations and determine a circle’s radius.
A few of them worked through practice problems one subject at a time, such as graphing five consecutive equations before going on to another kind of problem. A different group practiced with different types of problems, never using the same one twice. On a test a few weeks later, students who practiced with a range of problems performed better than those who practiced in blocks.
Similar to cramming, the fluency acquired by repeatedly solving identical problems in a row gives the appearance of thorough knowledge of the subject. A longer interval between self-checks (quizzes) enables a more precise evaluation of one’s knowledge.
The Bottom Line
Firstly, you need to get plenty of sleep!
A lack of sleep might make you irritated, unable to focus, and incapable of making judgments. Inadequate sleep may have a negative impact on both physical and mental health. If you have been revising all day and are already fatigued, staying up a few more hours will not significantly boost your mark. Sleeping has been scientifically demonstrated to boost procedural memory (which aids in the recall of skills and processes) as well as declarative memory.
Lastly, with deadlines coming, creating flashcards and problem sets ahead of exams may improve grades and reduce stress. However, if you find yourself cramming during finals season, try to get some rest whenever and wherever you can.