Now that AP exams are over and you’ve spent hours trying, and sometimes failing, to memorize maps of the rivers in China for AP World or ingrain the periodic table into your brain for AP Chemistry—what if I told you that there was a way to memorize it all?

John Arguello (‘90) has a way to do just this.

Arguello, program supervisor of COGexcel, a memory improvement program, presented Thursday, May 15 in the auditorium to share strategies for improving memory efficiency that can help high school students perform better on tests. He is implementing memory programs at Whitman, B-CC, Walter Johnson, and Churchill.

“Ideally, we are going to have at least three teams, and we are going to classify them by schedules and similar ability,” Arguello said. “These people will compete against themselves and we are going to reward how much they’ve improved.”

In the program, students will learn various memory techniques that will teach them how to study more efficiently and get better test results. The broad name for these techniques is mnemonic devices, which includes grouping, linking, association, visualization and method of loci—a procedure that involves depositing information in a familiar space to make recalling information easier.

“What’s effective is practicing in a deliberate way how to master each technique so that you know when to apply it,” Arguello said. “But even better, [knowing] how to combine these so you have a three and four punch play book.”

The most important aspect of memory training is that it teaches students techniques that are different from what is taught in school, said Lauren Devine, Quality Assistance Director of COGexcel.

“A lot of the things that we are told about learning are actually not helping us at all,” Devine said. “So, in other words, the most effective learning techniques are not intuitive.”

Some of these unhelpful learning techniques include highlighting, rereading and spending long periods of time studying the same material, Arguello said during his presentation.

One method of learning that Arguello denounced is the use of technology. Studying while using technology promotes multi-tasking or rapid attention shifting, and this does more harm than good, Arguello said.

“Multi-tasking is the stupidest thing on Earth because, first of all, it’s a fallacy—it doesn’t exist,” Arguello said. “When you effectively multitask, what you are doing is effectively destroying your sustained attention. So technology is not your friend.”

By emphasizing a reduction in technology while learning and drilling in the memory techniques, COGexcel has boasted a great deal of success in it’s eight years in business so far.

“They give us credit for stuff that we don’t even deserve,” Arguello said. “When you boost one’s self-perception of what they can do and at the same time you lift their ability, then you get really wonderful results.”