Students go through a rigorous syllabus that demands a lot of time to understand it well. Now, the primary purpose of going to an educational institution is to study the subject for which the student has enrolled. However, for the most part, the content is out of touch with the reality or demand from the industry. With the academic curriculum what it is, most of the subjects are either because of legacy courseware or some niche tangent that academic counsellors were too afraid to prune. About 6 courses with 6 detailed chapters each within 6 months with all theoretical, mathematical and practical aspects. The examination pattern further encourages a memory based assessment rather than checking for understanding of fundamental concepts. Let's return to this thought after a short detour.

Sleep research suggests pulling an all-nighter to cram facts for exam the very next day can still hold on some of the information but chances of that becoming part of long term memory are almost negligible. The hippocampus (short term memory aka RAM of our brain) needs adequate cycles of REM and NREM sleep to boost longer retention of concepts by passing them to pre-fontal cortex (long term memory aka Hard disk). The disruption caused by pulling all-nighters leads to insufficient brain activity in preserving these learnings.

Equipped with this additional information, let's return to the original premise. The question now is - is it better to spend hours and hours together going over the academic concepts of limited interest (and value) or play along the systemic chaos by choosing learn-vomit-refresh cycle through last night cramming.

Just because a group of experts thought it best to have subjects clubbed together in a particular format with almost equal weights to them in the hope that it provides a good basic understanding, doesn't solve for a student's intrinsic interest to explore a particular subject in much more depth. Perhaps, in future, as we approach personalized learning system, where students can drop subjects/chapters/concepts and appear for assessment examinations only for what they have studied and not what they were supposed to study, it may be prudent to revisit this. For now, I believe the smart thing to do is exactly what the young minds are doing already.