Studying for a Final When All You Have Is Lecture Slides: A 3-Week Plan

Twelve lecture decks. No textbook, or a textbook nobody actually bought. The final is in three weeks and covers everything.

Slides are a strange thing to study from. They were written to be talked over. A slide that says "Market failure → externalities, public goods, info asymmetry" was the outline for ten minutes of explanation, examples and a tangent about fishing quotas. If you were in that lecture and paying attention, the slide jogs your memory. If you weren't, or you were but it was eight weeks ago, it's three bullet points and an arrow.

So the first job isn't memorising the slides. It's getting back what the slides leave out — and then testing yourself on it, not rereading it.

Here's a plan for the three weeks.

Week 1: Rebuild, then question

Goal: every deck turned into notes you could learn from, and a set of questions for each.

Take one deck at a time. For each slide, ask: if I'd missed this lecture, could I explain this slide to someone? If yes, move on. If not, fill the gap — from the recording if there is one, the readings, a classmate's notes, or an AI.

AI is genuinely useful here, with one caveat. A prompt that works well:

Below is the text from one of my lecture slides for [course].
Explain what each bullet point means as a lecturer would have explained it in class, with one concrete example each.
If a bullet could mean more than one thing, tell me the possibilities rather than picking one.

[paste slide text]

The caveat: the AI doesn't know what your lecturer said. It knows what lecturers in this subject usually say. Where it matters — definitions, a specific model your professor uses, anything that sounds like it might be on the exam — check against the readings or the recording.

Then, for every deck, end with questions instead of more notes. Turn each slide into one or two questions you could be asked. If you'd rather not write them yourself, have an AI write them from your rebuilt notes and save them somewhere you'll come back to.

Don't skip this step. A week of beautiful notes with no questions sets you up for two weeks of rereading.

Week 2: Mixed practice

Goal: answer questions from every lecture, shuffled together.

This is where most people do the obvious thing — go deck by deck, answering the questions for lecture 1, then lecture 2 — and miss one of the more useful findings in learning research.

When you practise one topic at a time, you always know which method or concept a question needs, because it's the one you're on. On the exam, you don't. Half of answering an exam question is recognising what kind of question it is.

In a 2007 study by Rohrer and Taylor, students practised maths problems either grouped by type or shuffled together. During practice, the grouped students did better. On a test a week later, the shuffled group scored 63%; the grouped group scored 20%.

So in week 2:

• Each session, answer questions drawn from several lectures at once, in random order.
• Answer with your notes closed. Check afterwards.
• Every miss goes on a list with today's date.
• Start each session by re-answering yesterday's misses before anything new.

If there's a lecture you're completely lost on, this is the week to email your professor or go to office hours — and you'll walk in with a list of specific questions you got wrong, which is the kind of question they can actually help with.

Week 3: Past papers, then rest

Goal: practise under exam conditions and clear your list of misses.

• Early in the week: do a past paper or practice exam under timed conditions. If your course doesn't publish them, ask — many do on request. Mark it honestly. Every missed question goes on your list.
• Midweek: work through your list of misses. Anything you missed in week 2 and got right again since, test yourself once more. Anything still shaky gets a short explanation and a new question on the same idea.
• Last two days: nothing new. Only your misses list and a final mixed set of questions. If something still isn't sticking, accept it and spend your time on what's close.
• The night before: stop early and sleep. Sleep is when memories from the day get consolidated, and an all-nighter costs you more than it adds.

A note on the "missed lecture" problem

If you skipped a few lectures, don't panic and don't try to watch every recording at 2× in one night. Do week 1 for those decks first, with extra help from the readings and an AI explanation, and then treat them like everything else: questions, mixed practice, misses list.

What you're aiming for isn't having seen every slide. It's being able to answer a question on every slide you didn't know you'd be asked.

If you want the tedious parts handled

The parts of this plan that eat time are writing questions and keeping the misses list going day after day. Tali does both from your own slides: upload a deck, get notes and questions written from it, and whatever you miss comes back on a schedule. You can try it on one deck without signing up. But the plan works with a notebook, a spreadsheet and a chat window too — the method matters more than the tool.