How to Study for Finals When You Have No Motivation

Stop waiting for the motivation to come back: that's the first step in how to study for finals when you have no motivation. Set a minimum you'd meet even on your worst day, and count meeting it as a win. Decide what good enough means for each exam, then count sessions started, not hours.

Why the end of term drains you

Exam season changes how students sleep, and the numbers are large. Martin Zunhammer and colleagues surveyed 150 students at two universities in Regensburg, Germany, before, during and after an exam period. They used a standard sleep questionnaire that counts a score above 5 as poor sleep (PLoS ONE, 2014):

During exams, students spent about half an hour less in bed, and perceived stress was the strongest predictor of poor sleep. The study can't show that poor sleep caused low motivation. It does show how ordinary the slump is: in the month before their exams, more than half of these students were sleeping badly.

Over longer stretches, motivation slides too. Kristy Robinson and colleagues followed 789 engineering students through their first two years of college (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2019). Their confidence and the value they saw in the work declined. Costs rose, and effort cost, the sense that the work takes too much, rose faster than the stress it caused. Students whose motivation fell more slowly earned higher grades. So a dip by the last weeks of a term is common, not a sign that something in you broke.

How to study for finals when you have no motivation: a minimum plan

Give each day two numbers: a minimum that counts as a full day, and a stretch for days that go well. Maura Scott and Stephen Nowlis studied goals set as a range, such as "lose 2 to 4 pounds this week" (Journal of Consumer Research, 2013). People were more likely to come back to a range goal than to a single number. The range felt both reachable and challenging, and hitting it felt like an accomplishment. Here's a range for each exam still ahead of you:

Three rules keep the plan honest:

• The minimum is the plan. The stretch is optional, so a day at the minimum is a day done, not a failure.
• Your next exam sets the day. Its row is today's minimum; later exams share the stretch time.
• A session counts once it's started and has run its 30 minutes, whatever got done in it.

Say Statistics is in 2 days and History in 5. Today's minimum is two Statistics sessions, and History gets a session only if the day goes well. Once Statistics is over, History's row becomes the minimum, and it moves down a row as the exam gets closer.

If 30 minutes is still too much to start alone, borrow a start time. StudyDuo's Study Hour runs at one fixed time a day, and when the hour ends, the app asks whether your task got done: a daily check on your minimum. In Focus Room, the shortest session you can pick is 30 minutes, and in the app, 30 minutes in a room also keeps your streak alive.

If one bad grade took the motivation with it

A poor midterm often does more damage to motivation than to the course grade, because of how you explain it. Raymond Perry and colleagues gave attributional retraining to first-year students after the first test of a two-semester course (Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2010). The training taught students to explain results by causes they could control, such as effort and study methods, and to play down causes they couldn't. Of 457 students, those who'd done poorly or about average on that first test improved their later test scores, final course grades and first-year GPAs. The design was quasi-experimental, not fully randomized.

You can apply the same idea yourself. Write one sentence on why the midterm went badly, using only causes you control: "I started two days before" or "I reread instead of doing problems". Then add the one change you'll make for the final. "I'm bad at chemistry" is out, because nothing in it can change by the exam.

What good enough looks like

"Good enough" is the part of how to study for finals when you have no motivation that people skip, and it isn't a lower standard. It's a standard without the dread attached. Fuschia Sirois, Danielle Molnar and Jameson Hirsch pooled studies of perfectionism and putting things off (European Journal of Personality, 2017). Perfectionistic concerns, the worry about mistakes and about falling short of others' expectations, went with more procrastination (r = .23, 43 studies, 10,000 people). Perfectionistic strivings, simply holding high standards, went with less (r = −.22, 38 studies).

So keep the standard and drop the fear of missing it. For an exam you don't care about this week, good enough means:

1. A target grade, written down, that you can reach from where you are. For the exact score a final needs, the plan for several finals has the arithmetic.
2. Every topic on the review sheet seen at least once in the last week, even briefly.
3. The weakest topic first, in the first session of the week, while the deadline is still far enough off to fix it.
4. No blank answers. If the exam doesn't take points off for wrong answers, a guess can only help.

That checklist is the finish line. Anything past it is the stretch.

On the exam itself

Low motivation tends to show up again in the exam room, as rushing or leaving early. Two habits protect the points you've earned:

• Bank the sure points first. Read through every question, answer the ones you know, then go back to the rest.
• Change an answer when a second look says so. Most students believe they should stick with a first instinct. A review of the research by Kruger, Wirtz and Miller found the opposite: most answer changes go from wrong to right. People who change answers usually raise their scores (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005).

Stay until the time is up, or until every answer has been read twice. The minutes after you finish cost nothing, and a second read is when a careless slip can still be caught.

When the minimum won't happen

Some days even one session doesn't start. Three things are worth checking before you blame yourself:

• Is it just finals? If you stopped caring about school weeks ago, or about things you usually enjoy, the cause may be bigger than exam season. Why can't I study anymore? lists the signs worth taking to a doctor or your counseling center.
• Is the plan too big? Cut the stretch first, then drop to one exam per day, and keep the minimum for the earliest one.
• Is it one course? If a single subject is what you can't face, methods for a subject you hate start from why you dislike it.

If you have only two days left before a final, the 48-hour plan is built for that. And if studying alone is what makes the minimum feel impossible, a live study-with-me room gives you people working at the same time. In the end, how to study for finals when you have no motivation is mostly about a smaller daily target, kept every day until the last exam.