Does cramming actually work?
Sort of. Cramming can get you through a test the next morning, because the facts are still sitting in short-term memory. The catch is you forget most of it within days, and it's stressful. For anything you actually need to keep, like a cumulative final or a real skill, spacing your study out over days beats cramming by a lot.
Here's the honest version. If your test is tomorrow and you've done nothing, a hard cram session is better than nothing. The facts stay fresh in your short-term memory for a few hours, so you can scrape a passing grade. People really do pass exams this way.
The problem is what happens after. Without spacing things out, you forget a big chunk of new info within a day and most of it within a week. So crammed material doesn't stick. If you have a cumulative final later, or you need this stuff for the next class, you're basically starting from zero again.
The thing that actually works is spacing. Same total hours, but spread across several days with breaks in between. You revisit the material right as you're about to forget it, which is what locks it into long-term memory. It feels slower and less satisfying than a big cram, but you keep way more, and you're a lot less stressed the night before.