The Best Way to Review Lecture Recordings Before an Exam

A semester's worth of recorded lectures, watched back at 1x speed with a week before the exam, simply doesn't fit. The math rarely works, and even when it technically does, rewatching passively is one of the weaker ways to spend that time. Here's a plan that gets more out of the same number of hours.

Triage before you rewatch anything

Start with your existing notes, not the recordings. Go through them and sort topics into three piles: solid, shaky, and blank. This alone usually cuts the amount of video you actually need to revisit by more than half.

Rewatch only the shaky and blank sections, at the section level

For the material that needs real review, don't rewatch full lectures. Rewatch the specific chapter or timestamp range that covers it. If your notes have timestamps (see our note-taking guide if they don't yet), jump straight there. This is where a recorded lecture genuinely beats a live one for exam prep: you can go directly to the twelve minutes on the topic you're shaky on instead of sitting through the whole seventy-minute recording again to get there.

• •Watch the shaky sections at normal speed: this is exactly the content where speed-watching costs you the most.
• •For the blank sections, read the transcript first before deciding whether you need to watch the video at all. Sometimes the transcript alone is enough to fill the gap.
• •Resist the urge to rewatch the solid pile "just to be safe": that time is almost always better spent testing yourself on it instead.

End every review session by testing yourself, not rereading

The actual exam is going to ask you to produce an answer, not recognize one, so the closer your review sessions get to that format, the more useful they are. After rewatching or rereading a shaky section, close the material and write down everything you can recall, or answer practice questions on it, before checking back against your notes. This single habit, testing before checking, not checking while reading, is worth more than almost any other change you could make to how you use your remaining study time.

Space the sessions out if you have more than a few days

If your exam is more than a week out, don't do all your review in one long sitting the night before. Spread the shaky-and-blank material across two or three sessions with a day or two between them. The gap forces you to retrieve the material again rather than just recognize it from an hour ago, which is closer to what the exam will actually demand of you.