I like playing video games, so video game metaphors make sense to me. In video games you can often choose your difficulty setting. You can choose Easy Mode in which all of the monsters and puzzles are easy to beat, you start out with more health, and your ammo lasts longer. But in Easy Mode the rewards are small. In Normal Mode the monsters and puzzles are normal difficulty and the rewards are a bit higher than Easy Mode. In Hard Mode the monsters are really hard to kill and the puzzles are hard to solve. You don’t have much health or armour in Hard Mode so you die a lot. But the rewards for this mode are the best.

What on earth are you going on about, Melanie? What do videogames have to do with studying for a degree?

You can choose your difficulty setting in your studies as well. In Hard Mode studying you try to read every single page of the textbook and make detailed, colour-coded notes. You do every single online activity. You try to write every assignment to the best of your possible ability. It takes a long time to study on Hard Mode. But if you have that time available, you can earn the best rewards – you’ll get the best possible grades at the end of the module.

In Normal Mode studying you read as much as you can but you don’t always get around to reading every single thing. Sometimes you skim-read sections and don’t make notes except perhaps highlighting or underlining some sentences on a page. You skip the online activities when you don’t have the time. And you have a good try at the assignments but sometimes you rush them a bit. You’ll comfortably pass the module on Normal Mode (probably – it depends on you and on the module), but you won’t get the best possible grade.

Studying on Easy Mode you do the minimum you can get away with whilst still doing enough to pass the course. You only read the bits of the module that are essential to write the assignments. You don’t read them in detail with the goal of understanding; you just skim them, looking for things to put in your assignments. And you work on the assignments until you’re pretty sure you’ve done enough to pass and then you submit them. The maximum reward you hope for on Easy Mode is to barely pass.

All of this is to say – you don’t have to study on Hard Mode. Your family, your job, and your own physical and mental health are all more important than your studies. I’m writing this in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which has made everything so much harder that we all have to make compromises and get our priorities very clear. So it’s OK sometimes to decide to shift your effort down to Normal Mode or even Easy Mode. You can always step up the difficulty again later if things get better (they WILL get better by the way. I don’t know when, but they will).

If this article didn’t answer your question, click here