[grimes]

I've got a good accounting story for you...A couple years back I had a midterm in the second half of 3rd year Financial the morning after my birthday. Somehow managed to get out of bed and stumble to school, luckily the hangover hadn't set in too badly yet (probably cause I was still a little bit drunk). Obviously I hadn't studied much and knew virtually nothing about the specific topics being covered, but I remembered my prof always saying that you could answer every question in accounting by going back to the basic principles and then thinking logically through each question and applying those principles. So I figured "what the hell, I'm f*cked anyway, I'll give it a shot." So I did that for every question, handed the thing in and went back home to puke and pass out. And what do you know, when we got our marks back a few days later, I did better than everyone I knew on it. Suffice it to say, I didn't really study much for accounting ever again.

Now I'm not suggesting you give up studying, and what worked for me probably wouldn't work for a lot of people...but the fact is the reason I did better than my friends from then on was that they put too much emphasis on memorizing the mechanics of how to solve each type of question, whereas I didn't worry at all about the mechanics and just reasoned my way through everything by applying the basic principles. Probably somewhere in the middle is the ideal for most people...it's just a matter of finding what works for you.