Why Overnight Cramming Is a Confidence Trick You Play on Yourself

By Happy Ajuebon

You’ve probably heard the saying “first to read na him dey forget,” the excuse students give for only reading when exams draw near. Behind that excuse sits a fundamentally wrong assumption: that reading can wait until exam pressure forces your hand. My goal here is simple, to show you why starting your reading one week before exams is the last thing you want to do if you actually want your grades to improve. 

Lately, many students in UNILAG have lamented their falling grades, insisting their results don’t reflect their efforts. Some blame the marking process, or claim the there must be some errors; others suspect some secret conspiracy against them. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but isn’t it worth considering that we’ve simply gotten it wrong? 

Every semester, we go through the same cycle. A few weeks before exams, WhatsApp groups erupt into a frenzy, students scramble for materials to read, and then, exactly seven days before the first paper, the campus seems to wake up. Reading rooms fill overnight. This is when students begin to “lock in and jack.” Past questions start circulating like currency. We call this “serious mode,” as if seriousness only counts when it arrives under pressure — and then we wonder why the results keep getting worse. 

The result is that, having boxed ourselves into such a short preparation window, our only option for covering a whole semester’s worth of notes in one night or a few days is to cram it all in. Hence the “overnight cramming.”

However, it’s worth asking why we’ve normalized this. Somewhere along the way, cramming stopped looking like a failure of planning and started looking like a badge of honor, proof that you can perform well even after giving a course almost no attention all semester. We have embraced mediocrity, forgetting that passing an exam on a week of frantic reading is not the same as knowing the material, and the gap between the two catches up with everyone eventually. It shows up when results are released, in a final year project, in a job interview, or in a moment in class when a lecturer expects you to build on something you supposedly learned three semesters ago. 

The case against the one-week plan starts with memory itself. Cramming relies almost entirely on short-term recall. You can hold a topic in your head long enough to write it down on the day of the exam, but without spaced repetition, that information has nowhere stable to live. Psychologists have shown again and again that spacing study sessions across weeks produces far better long-term retention than massing them into a few intense days. A week of reading might get you through Thursday’s paper. But it will not carry you into the course two semesters from now that assumes you already mastered this one. 

A second argument is that not all information is understood the same way, because not all information is the same. Every time we read, we’re absorbing information, but not all of it the same kind. Sometimes it’s procedural, showing you how to get something done. Other times it’s elemental, analogous, or purely conceptual. Each kind demands a different way of understanding and memorizing it, and cramming them all the same way puts you at a disadvantage, especially when exam questions are built to test a specific kind. A fill-in-the-gap question, for instance, almost always tests elemental information, while an essay-type question tests procedural understanding.

There is also the matter of what cramming does to understanding itself. Reading under panic is reading for recognition, not comprehension. You skim a concept until it looks familiar, not until you can explain it in your own words or apply it to a new problem. This is precisely the difference between a student who can regurgitate a definition and one who can answer the twisted, application-based question a lecturer throws in to separate the two. UNILAG’s exams, particularly in courses that test analysis rather than recall, punish recognition-level reading without mercy. Students in faculties like Law, Engineering, Social Sciences, Mathematics, and Communication Studies feel this most. 

When asked what students constantly do wrong in exams, Dr. O. O. Oketumbi, the sub-dean of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, said students often don’t follow 

instructions and don’t understand what a question requires of them, which in turn affects how well they can answer it. But in the mind of the student who crammed all night, they believe they’ve crushed the exam. 

Sleep is something overnight cramming steals from you, and it’s essential to the learning process itself. It’s during sleep that the brain consolidates absorbed knowledge, makes connections, builds constructs, and draws patterns. A sleep-deprived brain can only regurgitate facts, and inaccurately at that. The payoff for protecting that process shows up in the numbers too: students who keep regular sleep hours and build long-term reading structures average significantly higher GPAs than those who don’t, and the gap isn’t small.

Furthermore, pulling an all-nighter or constantly changing your sleeping patterns right before exams means fighting against your own body’s circadian rhythm, the internal clock that decides when you sleep, focus, and retain information best. Disrupt that clock the night before an exam, and you walk in foggy at the exact moment you need to be sharp, because sleep is when your brain locks in what you studied. It’s like shooting yourself in the leg right before a race. You’ve sabotaged the very thing meant to carry you to the finish line. What’s the use?

Then there is the cost no one puts on the timetable: health. A week of nights with less than five hours of sleep, fueled by energy drinks, coffee, and skipped meals, is not a sustainable academic strategy. It is a stress test on the body, one that opens you up to sickness and to mental and emotional strain. Students walk into exam halls running on adrenaline and caffeine, and it shows: shaking hands, blank stares at familiar questions, and the kind of exhaustion that makes a second paper on the same day nearly impossible to manage well. None of this is necessary. It is the predictable result of postponing what could have been spread across three months into a few days.

In addition, there are the neurological effects we cannot ignore. According to a 1997 study published in Nature by researchers Drew Dawson and Kathryn Reid, people who stay awake for 17 to 19 hours have coordination and reaction times comparable to those who have been drinking. Now imagine such a  student walking into a 120-minute math exam the next morning, expected to work through complex problems on a brain functioning like it’s intoxicated. Sleep deprivation impairs decision-making and judgment, and while caffeine might give you a burst of energy while you’re reading, it won’t be there to help you during the actual exam. 

The honest counterargument is that UNILAG life does not always allow for a tidy reading schedule. Lectures get compressed, individual and group assignments pile up without warning, and sometimes a course outline only becomes clear close to exams. 

This is true, and it is exactly why the solution cannot be more willpower in the few days before exams. It has to be smaller, earlier habits that spread the work out instead of compressing it: reading lecture notes within a day or two of class, doing a short weekly review, and breaking reading into small daily sessions rather than one massive sitting close to exams. It also means treating certain basics as non-negotiable: attending class, sleeping seven hours a night, and reading actively enough to retain material, not just recognize it. From there, smaller tools help too, using AI to sharpen a study session, or treating past questions as practice from week three rather than a panic tool in week thirteen, but none of that works without the foundation already in place.

None of this asks for perfection. It asks for a shift in when the effort happens. The students who consistently do well are rarely the ones who read hardest in the final week. They are the ones who made the final week ordinary, because the real work was already done.