I had severe depression and unmedicated ADHD through college; you can pretty much guess how my efforts to learn looked. One summer I took Intro to Psychology; the entire course was DVD lectures from Philip Zimbardo and reading the textbook. It turns out that making an entire course self-paced but deadline-oriented was a terrible system for me. I didn't start studying for the midterm until about 8 hours before it was going to be administered. Oh wait, no. I'm wrong. I didn't do anything for the course until about 8 hours before the midterm. Yes, I first looked at the textbook around 8AM. The exam was at 4PM. I spent eight hours reading the book and highlighting. I got through about 80% of the material but was hardly studying it. Just skimming. Given the fact that the midterm was 40% of the grade this was an issue. I realized this wasn't optimal but was guessing that it would be a basic recall-style exam and in each question one answer choice would jump out as "Oh, I remember reading those words."
I was right about the format but not about my method working. The midterm came. It was 120 multiple-choice questions. After the first 3 it was clear I was going to get somewhere around a 20% simply because statistically speaking I should get about 1 in 5 questions right guessing randomly. I decided to throw a Hail Mary and hope for the best.
I was also an SAT tutor and developed a system for random guessing in math when you don't know how to answer the question. You progressively eliminate the answers that have the least in common with the other answers. Let's say that you see a question with these answer choices:
(1) x + y
(2) x + y + z
(3) 2x + 2y + z
(4) 2x + 2y - z
(5) 7x + 5y + z
(1) is wrong because it's the only answer choice with no z-variable. (2) is wrong because more answer choices have coefficients than ones which do not. (4) is wrong because it's the only answer choice that has a subtraction operation. (5) is wrong because its coefficients aren't shared with any other answer choice. The correct answer is (3) because its key elements- presence of a z-variable, all addition operators, the coefficients 2 with the x and y-variables, all give it the most shared elements with the other answer choices and without any key elements completely unshared with any of them.
So I said fuck it and answered the entire exam in this format. Yes, the entire exam. I answered every question on my first pass and didn't even read a single question. I checked my work by making sure that my answers did sound like the answered the question and changed a few of them but not many.
I got the highest grade in the class. I still don't know if I should be more proud of the fact this was the best work-to-grade ratio I've had in any class ever or of the fact I solved an exam by identifying and exploiting a technical flaw. I do feel guilty though about how the prof bumped into me one day in passing and spent whole minutes extolling the incredible preparation I must have put into his exam.