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Why You Keep Forgetting

What You Just Studied –

and How to Fix It

By Anastasis Aug 3 2025 Most Read

It’s 11:42 PM. You’ve just wrapped up an intense 2-hour Quant session. Time-Speed-Distance, Boats & Streams, Alligations, you were in the zone. You shut your notebook, feeling like a productive ninja. 

But the next evening, when you sit down to revise, you look at the same page, and it feels alien. 

Like you’re reading someone else’s notes. “Did I do this yesterday?” Yes, you did. And yes, you’ve forgotten it already. 

But before you start questioning your intelligence or blaming your memory, let’s take a deep breath and unpack what’s happening.


How Your Brain Works?

Your brain isn’t a sponge. When you study something, it doesn’t go straight into your long-term memory vault. It enters your working memory, which is like a mental whiteboard. It gets wiped clean unless you do something to make it stick.

So if you cram three RC techniques, five arithmetic formulas, and two para-jumble tricks in one night and then move on, you’re not learning. You’re just flooding a whiteboard. And guess what happens when you wake up the next day? Wipe. Gone.

The ‘Curve’ You’ve Been Ignoring

There’s this sneaky villain in every CAT aspirant’s prep story: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. Sounds fancy, but it shows this: you forget 50% of what you learned within an hour, and up to 80% within a week, unless you revise.

So when you tell yourself, “I’ll revise this later,” you’re trusting a memory that statistically won’t be there. You’re betting your CAT percentile on a brain that’s biologically wired to forget. But here’s the good part: you can fight the curve. You just need to outsmart it.

Repetition Isn't Boring; It’s Biology

The top 1% of CAT scorers don’t have photographic memories. What they do have is a system. They revisit concepts at spaced intervals: 1 day later, then 3 days, then 7, then 15.

This method is called Spaced Repetition. It tells your brain, “Hey, this info matters.” Every time you recall something after a gap, your memory traces deepen. The whiteboard scribbles turn into fixed carvings in your brain. So if you want to retain Venn diagram logic or RC question types, stop treating revision like a luxury. Make it a ritual.

The Retention Weapon

Here’s another reason you forget things: you keep re-reading instead of remembering. When you reread, your brain gets lazy. It says, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen this before,” but it doesn’t store it. You should use Active recall. Close the book and try recalling the process of solving a time-work problem. Teach the passage structure to your wall. Write a DILR strategy flowchart from memory. It’s uncomfortable. It’s slow. But it works.

Why You Need to Study Less

You don’t need to study 12 hours a day. A two-hour session with spaced recall, active questioning, and zero distractions beats an eight-hour blur of lectures, highlight markers, and background YouTube. Because what’s the point of solving 100 problems if you don’t remember any concepts? The CAT isn’t a memory test, but if you can’t retain your learning, then every practice session resets you back to zero.

The Fix is Consistency.

If this blog feels like a gentle slap, good. Because CAT doesn’t reward hard work that vanishes, it rewards consistency that compounds over time. So next time you finish a session, don’t just close the tab. Ask yourself:

  • Can I recall what I just did?
  • When will I revisit this?
  • Can I explain it in one sentence?

And when you do forget, which you will, don’t panic. Just revise better. Come back to it again and again until it stops slipping. Because that’s how toppers study. Not with genius, but with grit.


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