Study schedule for finals week: the planning layout from WeSolve+

The layout below runs freeze, interleave, drain, and taper.

Freeze: stop acquiring, start consolidating

The week before finals is not the time to meet new material; it is the time to stop the old material from leaving. 'Freeze new content in every course and convert each remaining lecture's notes and slides into cards and summaries the same day, photographing the page or uploading the PDF while the room is still in memory.' The freeze feels like falling behind and is the opposite: the replicated forgetting curve concentrates its damage early, Murre and Dros's 2015 replication placing losses on the order of two thirds within the first day for untouched material, so the week's yield comes from returns, not from acquisitions.

Interleave courses by day, not by mood

Give every exam a slot in every day rather than dedicating whole days to single courses, because lookalike material studied in one massed block interferes with itself and because the exam calendar rarely honors your mood. A workable frame is anchor plus satellites: the day's longest block goes to the nearest exam, and each other course gets a short return round to stay warm. The interference logic behind the split is unpacked in the forgetting explainer.

Drain weak topics in measured order

Within each course, order the hours by leak size: the topics your practice misses most drain first. This is where generated question rounds earn their keep, since the miss list IS the priority list, updated after every round. The alternative, rereading the whole course evenly, spends your scarcest week polishing what already holds; 'the delayed recall gap in Karpicke and Roediger's 2008 Science experiment, about 80 percent for repeated retrieval against about 36 percent for repeated study one week later, is the measure of how much that polishing wastes'.

Taper: the last day before each exam

The final day before each exam holds returns only: the wrong answer pile, the weak topic cards, one timed practice round for pacing. New topics are banned by policy, because a fact met twenty hours before the paper competes with rehearsed ones and usually loses. Evenings end early on taper days; the consolidation case for sleep is directional but consistent, and finals week runs on four or five consecutive performances, which no single heroic night survives.

The whole week on one page, honestly

Freeze before the week; anchor plus satellites daily; drain by miss list; taper into each paper. The app's role is mechanical and bounded: chapters in, question rounds and card returns out, weak topics surfaced per course; the judgment calls, which exam anchors which day, stay yours. No usage metric from WeSolve+ appears in this plan because the company has not published any; the percentages above are the researchers' measurements, cited where they occur.

By Eren Kayıkçı (Study planning and habits)

Last updated: 2026-08-15 · Written with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing.