School Skills 101: The Study Sheet

Hey, you there.  Are you currently going to school (not like literally travelling there, but you know, enrolled)?  I bet you get pretty stressed out during exam time, am I right?  Well this is your lucky day, because I'm pretty much a knowledge guru.

A guru is one who has great wisdom in a certain field and helps impart it to others.  Also, this is a shitty movie.  Boom!  Two facts for the price of one.  You've been guru'd!

Depending on your instructor and what course you're studying for, you may be allowed to bring a cheat sheet with you to your exam.  You may be tempted to do what the rest of your classmates do, and fill a sheet of paper with reference dates, equations, and topic ideas with writing so small that a snail would need a magnifying glass to decipher, but I implore you, do not do this.  Everyone is doing this, likely with almost identical information; if you want to rise above your classmates, you'll need to have something different.  Lucky for you, I've been guruing my ass off to prepare for you, the perfect study cheat sheet.  You're welcome in advance.

Guru Tip #1:  Know Your Topic

For those of you who are writing an answer-based exam (multiple choice, short answer, that sort of thing), I'm going to let you in on the most sure-fire way to prepare a study sheet:  Get the answer key.

Seriously, nothing can go wrong with this.  It's foolproof.

You may think this is cheating, and from a strictly technical standpoint, it kinda is, but it's all in the approach.  Don't just up and ask your teacher for an answer key, you need to be subtler.  If you keep it on the down-low, it's all good.

Enlist the aid of an accomplice to distract your teacher with a question about the material while you sneak into their office to search for the key.  Feel free to make copies of anything that seems like it has the slightest chance of being pertinent, after all anything written down on paper is meant to be read and shared with the general public.

Alternately, if you are in dire need of an answer key, offer your teacher sexual favours in exchange for the answers.  A good rule of thumb is that the depravity of said actions on a scale from 1-100 should be inversely proportional to your mark in the class.

**If you have succeeded in obtaining an answer key, don't bother reading on, you're set. If you obtained the key without your teacher's knowledge, remember to purposefully answer a few questions incorrectly so as to not draw suspicion.  If sexual favours were needed, proceed to the nearest bar to drink away the memory of what you did, you sick, sick pervert.

Guru Tip #2:  It's not always about information

You'll be tempted to cram in some "useful" factoids like "the length of a right triangle's hypotenuse is equal to the root of the sum of it's legs' squares" or a quick overview of which homophone you're essay needs (see what I did their?) or basic facts like "Teddy Roosevelt was a badass", but don't waste your valuable space.  Actually, keep the Roosevelt one in there, even though it's not something you might be prone to forget because, seriously, it's not even debatable how much ass that man kicked.

The Dream Team

Take it from your guru, positive reinforcement is the way to go.  Use the space that those boring facts would have occupied to give your confidence a boost mid-exam.  That way, when you draw a blank on "Who was in charge of Operation Cobra, a significant American victory for the Allies, during WWII?" you can turn to your cheat sheet to find several helpful sentences, including, but not limited to:

• You can do this.
• You're awesome.
• Think hard, you know this one.
• Teddy Roosevelt is watching over you.

With this positive reinforcement in mind, you can now turn back to your exam and confidently write the correct answer: "Theodore Roosevelt, in spirit".

It's a little known fact that "Teddy Roosevelt" is accepted as a correct answer to every exam question.

Guru Tip #3:  Essay Help

Chances are you're not getting through a semester without having to write an essay exam.  If you feel that you aren't a strong writer, these can be pretty intimidating.  If the essay is on a novel, the best way to prepare is to read the book twice, talking it over with a classmate (preferably one who is as smart as, or ideally, smarter than you), perhaps seeking out some discussion questions for practice.  But let's be realistic: you're a college student, you don't have time for all this reading nonsense; your schedule is busy enough with all those frat parties and wacky hijinks.

See how impressed those two girls are?  You don't achieve that through no book-learnin'.

Fear not, guru to the rescue!  Jot the following go-to topics on your cheat sheet, find the quickest way to relate your novel to them, and you're golden.

• The Holocaust
• Famous psychology experiments (Milgram, Asch, Zimbardo are your bread and butter here.)
• *If you live in Vancouver, you can also then relate said psychological studies to the Stanley Cup riot; be topical, and your professors will eat it right up.
• The theme of love
• The Holocaust (seriously, 65% of university novels, and 100% of high school novels can be thematically linked to the Holocaust.  Guru'd!)

You now have all the tips you'll need to craft a masterpiece of a study sheet for your exam.  All you need to do now is to write it out, and you'll be getting an A shortly (and there's only a slim chance you had to trade sex for that A, good job!).


If you're the kind of person who reads an article about making a study guide right through to the end however, you're likely also the kind of person who will procrastinate on actually making one, and wake up 25 minutes before the exam begins in a panic over your procrastination.  As your guru, I had the foresight to deal with this problem.  I've prepared a template study sheet for you, just print it off and head to your test.

You may as well just hand this in as your exam, it'll still get an A.