How to Become an Academic Weapon: 5 Habits That Hold Up

Five plain habits answer how to become an academic weapon: go to every class and recall each lecture before you leave the room. Then relearn each week's material in three short self-tests, plan your study before every exam, and protect your sleep. Each has research behind it, and none asks you to study through the night.

"Academic weapon" is internet slang for a student who is formidably good at school. Know Your Meme traces it to tweets from 2013. It spread in September 2022, when TikToker Brad Kraut began posting videos using it; the most viewed passed 6 million views in a month. The habits below are the part of the trend worth keeping.

What the five habits take each week

How to become an academic weapon, habit by habit

1. Go to every class

Showing up is the habit with the strongest link to grades. Marcus Credé, Sylvia Roch and Urszula Kieszczynka pooled the studies on it in a 2010 meta-analysis. Attendance correlated .44 with class grades, across 69 studies and 21,195 students, and .41 with overall GPA, across 33 studies.

That made attendance a better predictor of college grades than any other known predictor, SAT scores, high school GPA, study habits and study skills included. It was only weakly related to conscientiousness and motivation, so it isn't just a sign of the students who would do well anyway. The studies are correlational, but the habit is cheap: the hour is already in your schedule. If you miss one, get the material the same week and do habit 2 from the slides.

2. Recall the lecture before you leave

Keith Lyle and Nicole Crawford taught a statistics course for psychology students (Teaching of Psychology, 2011). They ended each lecture with a few questions on that day's material, answered from memory. They called it PUREMEM. Exam scores were significantly and substantially higher in the section taught this way than in a section taught without it, and students liked the routine.

It was two sections of one course, not a randomized trial, but you can run it yourself. In the last three minutes of a lecture, close your notes and write down the main points, a definition or a worked step. Then check against the slides and mark what you missed: those are the first questions for habit 3.

3. Relearn each lecture three times that week

Successive relearning means testing yourself on the same material in several spaced sessions, until you get each item right once per session. Philip Higham and three colleagues ran it through a whole semester of introductory psychology at a UK university (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2022). After each Monday lecture, students practiced on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. In relearning weeks, they answered 20 fill-in-the-blank questions on the lecture, with feedback. A question they got right dropped out for that session, and a missed one came back up to two more times. In the other weeks, they reread the same 20 sentences, complete, twice per session.

At the end of term, 42 and 68 days after the lectures, the students took tests on both kinds of weeks:

The gain was large for the questions students had practiced and small for everything else; the last two gaps fell just short of statistical significance. So write your practice questions about what the exam will ask. In a difficult biopsychology course, Jessica Janes and colleagues found the same method raised performance on a high-stakes exam by at least 10% in two experiments (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2020). For solving types of probability problems, the benefit was small: d = 0.28 across three experiments with 431 students (Educational Psychology Review, 2020). In problem-solving courses, keep doing whole problems as well.

It doesn't take long. In Higham's study, each question took 24 to 37 seconds per session on average, so 20 questions came to about 8 to 12 minutes. Paper flashcards work: put a card aside once you answer it, and go through the misses again.

4. Plan your resources before each exam

Part of how to become an academic weapon comes down to deciding how to study before deciding how much. Patricia Chen, Omar Chavez, Desmond Ong and Brenda Gunderson tested this in two cohorts of a college statistics course (Psychological Science, 2017). Before each exam, students randomly assigned to the intervention answered three things online. Which resources would they use to study, why would each be useful, and how would they use them?

Those students reported thinking more about how they learned, used their resources more effectively, and beat the control group by a third of a letter grade on average. About a week before each exam, answer the same three questions in writing:

1. Which resources? Past exams, practice problems, lecture slides, office hours, the textbook, a study group.
2. Why each one? "Past exams show the question types" is a reason; "everyone uses them" isn't.
3. How and when? "Two timed past exams on Saturday, then the misses with the TA on Tuesday."

5. Protect your sleep

Sleep belongs on the plan, not after it. Monica Hartmann and Roxanne Prichard analyzed a US national survey of 55,322 college students (Sleep Health, 2018). On average, each additional day a week with sleep problems raised the probability of dropping a course by 10% and lowered cumulative GPA by 0.02. Stress, binge drinking and drug use had similar or smaller links with grades than disturbed sleep did.

It's a survey, so it shows associations, not cause. About three quarters of the students said their university had never given them information about sleep. The practical rule is simple: no session ends after your usual bedtime, in exam week too.

A week of the system for one course

Each habit needs a slot in the week. Here's a week for a course with a Monday lecture; a second course gets the same pattern from its own lecture day:

Fifteen-minute slots leave room for a session that runs long. Put each slot in your calendar the way you'd put a class there.

What doesn't hold up

Some of the trend's tips work against the habits above. The evidence for each swap is in other guides:

Keeping the habits going all term

A slot you share with other people starts whether or not you feel ready. On StudyDuo, Study Hour gathers everyone at one fixed moment each day, converted to your local time. The hour has no breaks, and the doors open 10 minutes ahead. That hour fits a Sunday relearning session and the resource plans. Focus Room never closes, for the other slots: your task shows to the room, and its shortest block, 30 minutes, covers a relearning session plus the week's questions. In the app, every hour you log counts toward the shield shown beside your name: 1, 10, 100 hours and on.

The study together app page shows how rooms, hours and reminders connect. If this term has already gone badly, start with the academic comeback plan and add these habits once the worst is fixed. Most of how to become an academic weapon is turning up: to class, to three short self-tests a week, and to bed.