You will be able to use an assistant to create practice questions and a review schedule.
Most people learned to study at school by rereading their notes, highlighting the important parts and cramming the night before. These habits feel productive at the time, but a week after the exam most of the material is gone. Saving a good tutoring chat with an AI assistant so you can reread it later is the adult version of the same habit.
A better method rests on two of the most reliable findings in the study of learning, and the assistant can do the tedious part for you.
Pulling information out of memory strengthens your ability to recall it again. You do this when you answer a question or explain something without your notes in front of you. This is called the testing effect, also known as retrieval practice, and it has been seen across many kinds of material and many kinds of learners. Rereading gives you a sense of familiarity, but it only exercises recognition, which is much weaker than recall.
A quiz is therefore more than a way to measure what you know. It is one of the best ways to learn it. Every question you answer from memory does more for you than another read-through of your notes, and that includes the questions you get wrong.
Most people never write their own practice questions because doing it is slow and tedious. An assistant can produce them in seconds, on exactly your topic and at exactly your level.
Grace, who you met in lesson 8.1, works in a store and attends finance meetings. She had a good tutoring session with the assistant on balance sheets, saved the chat, and planned to reread it before the next finance meeting. That plan would have given her familiarity with the material and very little practice at recalling it, so she asked the assistant for practice questions instead.
Practice questions are not all equally useful, so the way you ask matters. Ask for a mix of question types, including definition questions, application questions and explain-why questions, and avoid a block of one type. When the types are mixed, you have to work out which idea each question needs, which is closer to how you will use the knowledge at work. Ask for the questions in increasing difficulty, so you warm up with simple recall and work up to harder application. Ask for some worked problems drawn from your real work, and describe that work in general terms only, with no confidential figures. Ask for the questions to be numbered.
Tell the assistant not to give the answers yet. If the answers sit just below the questions, your eye drifts down to them and you are back to recognising instead of recalling.
Grace described her store's situation to the assistant in general terms, with no confidential figures, and asked for problems like it. She asked for fifteen practice questions on reading a balance sheet, at her level from the last session. She wanted a mix of definitions, application and explain-why questions, ordered easy to hard, with three worked problems based on a retail store, all numbered and with no answers yet. One problem asked what would happen to the balance sheet if the store paid off a supplier invoice early. Another gave her a simplified balance sheet with example figures and asked which items had changed most since the last month and what might explain the change.
Attempt every question from memory, without notes, before you see any solution. Write your answers down, even briefly. To check them, either ask the assistant for the answers, or paste in your own answers and have it mark them strictly and say what you missed. Note which questions you got wrong and look for any pattern in them.
On her first attempt, Grace got eleven of fifteen right. All four questions she missed were about how the balance sheet links to the cash position, which showed her exactly what to focus on.
Spaced practice means spreading practice over several days. It gives much better long-term memory than the same amount of practice crammed into one session. A little forgetting between sessions helps, because recalling something you have half forgotten strengthens it more than recalling something you saw five minutes ago. Plan several short sessions instead of one long session the night before you need the knowledge.
A workable pattern is a first session, a review a day or two later, then another review a few days after that. Fifteen minutes of questions per review is plenty. At the start of each new session, ask for a fresh set of questions weighted towards your weak areas, without looking at your notes first, and begin with the questions you got wrong last time.
Two days after her first attempt, Grace did not look at her notes first. She asked the assistant for a fresh set of questions weighted towards the link between the balance sheet and the cash position.
Spaced practice only works if the spaced sessions actually happen, and good intentions do not survive a busy week. Put your review sessions in your calendar as short appointments with yourself, each labelled with the topic. Grace booked two fifteen-minute review slots over the following week and labelled each one with the topic.
Next, ask the assistant for practice questions on your own topic. Answer them without notes before you look at any solutions, then put your two review sessions in the calendar.
Ask for fifteen practice questions on your topic, answer them without notes, and schedule two review sessions in the next week.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).