Why You Forget What You Study (and How to Make It Stick)
You can understand a topic completely on Sunday and find it gone by the time you need it. That is not a sign you are slow. Forgetting is the brain working exactly as designed. The good news is that it follows rules, and once you know them you can study so that what you learn stays learnt.
Written by Michael Siaw Larbi
Most students study by reading, and then reading again. It feels like progress, the words grow familiar, and familiarity is mistaken for knowledge. Then the exam asks you to produce it from a blank page and it will not come. The problem was never your intelligence or your effort. It was the method. Here are seven ways to study so the knowledge is there when you reach for it, each one shown on the kind of material you actually sit.
The forgetting curve
More than a century ago Hermann Ebbinghaus showed that memory of new material fades sharply in the days after you learn it, unless you do something to interrupt the slide. Every technique in this guide is a way of interrupting that slide.
This guide is built to be used, not just read. Every technique below comes with a small tool to try it on real exam material right now. The first guide in this series was about the exam room itself. This one is about getting the knowledge to survive the weeks before you walk in.
Active Recall: Test Yourself, Do Not Re-read
This is the single most powerful change you can make. Instead of reading your notes again, close them and try to produce the answer from memory. The effort of pulling something back out of your head is what strengthens the memory. Reading puts information in front of you; recall forces your brain to find it, and finding it is the rep that builds the muscle.
Re-reading is seductive because it feels smooth and the material seems easy the second time. That smoothness is a trap. It is recognition, not memory. The only honest test of whether you know something is whether you can write it down with the book shut. So turn every note into a question and answer it cold.
Try it now
Active recall in ten seconds
Answer in your head first, then reveal and rate yourself honestly. The struggle to retrieve is the point.
Card 1 of 3
What is the accounting equation?
Spaced Repetition: Review on a Widening Schedule
If active recall is how you study, spaced repetition is when. Rather than reviewing a topic once and moving on for good, you revisit it at growing intervals: a day later, then a few days, then a week, then a fortnight. Each review arrives just as the memory begins to fade and pushes it back up, and each time it fades more slowly than before. You end up needing fewer reviews to hold more knowledge.
This is also why cramming fails. A topic crammed the night before sits in memory for hours, not weeks. The same hours, spread across a month, would have held the topic for the exam and well beyond it.
Work it out
Your spaced review schedule
Name a topic and the day you learned it. The tool lays out when to review it, and can save all five dates to your calendar in one file.
Each review resets the curve and the line falls more gently afterwards. The dashed line is what happens with no review at all.
Open the downloaded file to add all five dates to your calendar.
Five short reviews, ending about five weeks out. A few minutes each beats one long cram.
Interleaving: Mix Your Practice, Do Not Block It
Most students practise in blocks: twenty VAT questions, then twenty on tax administration, then twenty on withholding tax. It feels efficient and your scores within each block look good. But the exam does not arrive in blocks. It jumps between topics, and the real skill is recognising what a question is asking for. Blocked practice never tests that, because you already know every question in the VAT block is a VAT question.
Interleaving means shuffling the deck: a VAT question, then tax administration, then withholding tax, then back again. It feels harder and your practice scores dip, and that discomfort is exactly the work. You are training the thing the exam actually tests, knowing what each question wants when nobody tells you which topic you are in.
See it, then do it
Blocked versus interleaved
Same nine questions, two orders. Then try the drill: read a cold question stem and name its topic before you would be able to answer it.
Blocked, the comfortable way
Interleaved, the way that builds judgement
Now you try: name the topic
Question 1 of 6
Elaboration: Force the Why
A fact you only memorise sits alone and slips away. A fact you understand is tied to other things, and every tie is another route back to it. Elaboration means refusing to leave a point as a bare statement and asking why it is true, what it connects to, and what would happen if it were not so.
Worked example
Ask why until it sticks
A bare fact is easy to forget. Keep asking why, and watch one rule from IFRS 15 tie itself to everything around it.
Step 1 of 4
The fact
IFRS 15 recognises revenue when control of a good or service passes to the customer.
That chain of whys is elaboration. A fact tied to four others is far harder to lose than one standing alone.
Dual Coding: Pair Words With a Picture
Your memory holds words and images through different channels, so a point you both read and draw is stored twice over, with two ways back to it. This is why a diagram you sketched yourself sticks far better than a paragraph you read. The act of drawing forces you to decide how the parts relate.
Worked example
Read it, or see it
Same group, two channels. Flip between them and notice the picture is the one you would rebuild in the exam.
Parent Ltd owns 80 per cent of Sub Ltd, enough to control it, so Sub is a subsidiary and is fully consolidated. Parent also owns 30 per cent of Assoc Ltd, enough for significant influence but not control, so Assoc is an associate and is equity accounted.
Control gives a subsidiary, fully consolidated. Significant influence gives an associate, equity accounted.
Mnemonics: A Hook for the Things That Must Be Verbatim
Some things genuinely have to come back word for word: a list, a format, the order of a statement. For these, understanding is not enough and a memory hook does the job. A short phrase or acronym gives your brain a handle to grab the whole list by.
Worked example
A hook for a list: POPIC
The five fundamental principles of the IFAC Code of Ethics, held together by one word, POPIC. Read the first letters down the column. Tap each to see what it means.
Comply with the relevant laws and regulations, and avoid any conduct that would discredit the profession.
Do not let bias, conflict of interest or pressure from others override your professional judgement.
Keep your knowledge and skill at the level the work requires, and act diligently to current standards.
Be straightforward and honest in all professional and business relationships.
Respect information acquired through your work. Do not disclose it or use it for personal advantage.
The hook is the word POPIC, the first letters of the five principles. Quick test, which principle means being straightforward and honest? Integrity.
Use mnemonics sparingly and only where rote recall is unavoidable. They are a shortcut for the few things that resist understanding, not a substitute for it.
Teach It: Explain It to Someone Else
Explaining a topic out loud, in plain words, is the most demanding test there is. You cannot hide behind a highlighted page. The moment you stumble or wave your hands is the moment you have found the gap, the exact spot you did not understand as well as you thought.
You do not need a willing audience. Explain it to an empty room, to a classmate in a study group, or type it out as though answering a colleague. On the MSL app, posting an explanation in SmartConnect or talking a problem through with the AI does the same job: the act of putting it in your own words is what exposes and then closes the gap.
Try it now
Explain it in your own words
Explain what a dividend is, as if to a classmate who missed the lecture. Plain words, no notes.
Reading is recognition. Recall is memory. Only one of them walks into the exam with you.
What I Tell My Students
When someone tells me they studied hard and still blanked, I rarely doubt the hours. I ask how they spent them, and almost always the answer is reading. Reading is the comfortable choice because it never shows you what you do not know. Recall does, and that sting is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works. Study in a way that makes you uncomfortable now, and the exam will not be the first time your memory is tested under pressure.
Michael Siaw Larbi
Do This Today
Take one topic you studied this week. Close the book and write down everything you remember, from a blank page. Then open the book and mark what you missed. That gap is your real revision list, and you found it in ten honest minutes instead of discovering it in the exam.
Questions Students Ask
Why do I forget what I study so quickly?
Because forgetting is the brain's default. Memory of new material fades in the days after you learn it unless you revisit it deliberately, a pattern first mapped by Hermann Ebbinghaus. It is not a sign of low ability. The fix is to study in ways that interrupt the fade, chiefly testing yourself and reviewing on a widening schedule.
What is active recall and why does it work?
Active recall means closing your notes and producing the answer from memory rather than re-reading. The effort of retrieving information is what strengthens the memory of it. Re-reading feels easier because it is recognition, not recall, and recognition is a poor predictor of whether you can reproduce the material in the exam.
What is spaced repetition and how should I schedule it?
Spaced repetition means reviewing a topic at widening intervals, for example one day later, then three days, then a week, then a fortnight, then a month. Each review lands as the memory begins to fade and pushes it back up, and the fade slows each time. It is far more effective than reviewing once or cramming, because it holds knowledge for weeks rather than hours.
Is cramming ever a good idea?
Cramming can place facts in short-term memory for a few hours, so it occasionally rescues a single sitting, but it does not build lasting knowledge and it collapses under exam pressure and fatigue. The same total hours spread across several weeks, using recall and spacing, will hold far more and leave you calmer on the day.
How is interleaving different from normal practice?
Interleaving means mixing question types in your practice rather than doing them in blocks of one topic. It feels harder and your practice scores dip, but it trains the skill the exam actually tests: recognising what a question calls for when nobody tells you. Blocked practice hides that skill because every question in the block is the same type.
Which technique should I start with?
Start with active recall, because it changes the most for the least effort: simply replace re-reading with self-testing. Once that is a habit, add spaced repetition by scheduling your reviews. Those two together do most of the work. The rest, interleaving, elaboration, dual coding, mnemonics and teaching, sharpen specific kinds of material.
This is the second guide in the Excellence Blueprint, MSL Business School's study and exam technique series. A new guide publishes every week, written by Michael Siaw Larbi.
