All-nighter
An all-nighter is when you stay up the whole night studying right before a test instead of sleeping. People do it to cram more in, but it usually backfires, because going without sleep wipes out a lot of what you just learned and leaves you foggy.
The problem is how your brain handles memory. While you sleep, your brain takes what you studied that day and locks it in. Skip the sleep and you skip that step, so a lot of the cramming never really sticks. You walk into the exam having seen everything once and remembering almost none of it.
Then there's the next morning. After a night with no sleep, your focus drops hard and your reaction time slows way down. Some studies say it hits you about as much as a few drinks would. So even the stuff you do know gets harder to pull up when you need it.
A better move is to study in smaller chunks over a few days and actually sleep before the test. You learn more and you show up able to think. An all-nighter feels productive at 3am, but it rarely pays off on the exam.
Mara had her psychology final at 9am and had barely opened the slides. She stayed up all night rereading them. In the exam she kept blanking on terms she'd read four hours earlier, and by the second page she could barely keep her eyes open.