Here is the most expensive habit in exam prep: reading the chapter again. It feels productive, it feels responsible, and it is measurably one of the weakest things you can do with an hour. The research on this isn't subtle, and it isn't new — it just keeps losing to how studying feels.
The effect sizes, briefly
The landmark 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues rated ten study techniques on the strength of their evidence. Practice testing came out at the top — “high utility,” robust across ages, materials, and delays. Rereading came out at the bottom tier: “low utility,” with benefits that are small and evaporate over time.
Meta-analyses of the testing effect consistently land in medium-to-large territory — retrieval practice beats restudy by roughly half a standard deviation or more, and the advantage grows as the exam gets further away. Rereading's edge, where it exists at all, shows up on tests taken minutes later and vanishes by the week mark. Your exam is not in minutes.
Why your brain prefers rereading anyway
Rereading feels good because the second pass is fluent — the sentences are familiar, everything clicks, nothing hurts. Your brain reads that fluency as knowing. It isn't. It's recognition, and the exam doesn't test recognition; it hands you a blank and asks you to produce.
Practice questions feel worse precisely because they're doing more. Retrieval is effortful, misses sting, and the sting is the signal: you just found a gap while it was still cheap to fix. The discomfort you're avoiding by rereading is the mechanism.
Making questions the default hour
Restructure the standard study hour to 40/20: forty minutes of questions in tutor mode, twenty minutes rebuilding the misses. Reading still happens — but it's dispatched by the misses, targeted at the specific gap, and capped. Reading in response to a miss is repair; reading instead of questions is anesthesia.
If the switch feels risky before a big exam, run the experiment: two topics of similar difficulty, one prepped by rereading, one by questions, quizzed cold three days later. The gap will make the argument better than any review paper can.