Preparing for the YKS with ADHD: A One-Year Plan

The YKS is not an exam, it is a year.

This sentence sounds like a cliché, but for a student with ADHD it describes the whole matter. Because what is hard is not the difficulty of the questions; it is carrying twelve months in the same direction.

This article describes how to build those twelve months. It does not teach subjects and does not give a topic breakdown. It describes the carrying system.

Why the process hits exactly the hardest place

If you listed the conditions ADHD struggles with most, the list that came out would be a description of the YKS process.

The reward is very far away. A result in June produces no signal for an evening in October. In ADHD the value of a delayed reward falls faster; I covered this in the article on dopamine and motivation. So the sentence "winning a place at university" is not enough to sit you down at the desk this evening, and this is not a character problem.

External structure is weak. School fills part of the day, but the real work is done outside school. Who will study, when they will study, how much they will study; the student decides all three. As the number of decisions rises, the load on executive functions rises.

The task is unclear. "Study math" is not a job description. When it is not clear where to start, the threshold for starting goes up; I wrote about the mechanism of this in the article on task paralysis.

Feedback is sparse. Whether studying is working shows up only in a mock exam, and weeks pass between mock exams.

When all four are present, this is the picture that emerges: the student wants to study, knows how to study, and cannot sit down at the desk. The name of this picture is not laziness.

Dividing the year into four periods

A single twelve-month plan does not work in ADHD, because nowhere in such a plan is there a feeling of "done."

The setup that works is dividing the year into four parts, each with its own ending.

First period: laying the foundation. Closing the missing groundwork. The job of this period is not speed but ground. What is skipped here comes back to you in every later topic.

Second period: finishing the topics. Going through the curriculum. The measure of this period is understanding; not memorizing, and not solving mock exams either.

Third period: mock exams and review. This is where the real work is done. The knowledge is there but has not settled into the exam format; this period settles it.

Fourth period: the last month. No new topics. The job of this period is to protect what you have and to turn exam day into a rehearsal.

It matters that each period has its own ending. Because in ADHD, if the end of a job is not visible, that job never starts. Four end points bring a year down to four portable pieces.

A weekly loop, not a daily calendar

This is where most plans collapse.

The common advice is to make a program filled in hour by hour. Monday 16.00-17.30 math, 17.45-19.00 Turkish. This program assumes two things: that time can be estimated correctly and that every day will pass with the same energy.

Neither is reliable in ADHD. Time blindness shifts time estimates systematically; and energy changes from day to day. The program breaks on the first Wednesday and is abandoned the day it breaks.

What you put in its place is a weekly loop.

In the loop, the day is fixed, the duration is flexible. Monday is math day; how many hours are studied that day changes according to the state of that day. Tuesday is Turkish day. This way the decision of which subject to look at when is made once a week, not anew every day.

This brings the number of decisions down from seven a week to one. This is exactly the resource that is saved most in ADHD.

A single main task for each day

To be able to say "today is done" at the end of the day you need a measure, and that measure has to be one item.

When five items are written for a day, this is what happens: three get done, two are left, and the day counts as a failure. The next day the same plan, the same result. On the third day the plan is abandoned.

I described this cycle in the article on all-or-nothing thinking. The solution is to change the definition of the day: one main task, and an extra task if there is one. When the main task is finished the day counts as complete; the extra task is a bonus.

The main task has to be concrete. Not "study math" but "finish the derivative lesson notes and solve ten questions." An unclear task does not get started.

The bad-week version

This is the single item that decides the durability of a year-long plan, and it is found in almost no program.

You will get sick. A period will come when you cannot do anything for a week. Something will happen in the family, an exam will go badly, motivation will be completely cut off.

These are not outside the plan; they are things that need to be written into the plan.

The bad-week version is the smallest form of the loop. Twenty minutes a day, a single subject, a single topic. Its aim is not to progress; it is to keep the streak. Because in ADHD a system that has been dropped is not rebuilt, it is built again from the start, and the cost of building again from the start is very high.

A bad week of twenty minutes protects more than a perfect week that was never done.

Starting to study: the first five minutes

The most expensive part of the day is not the hours studied but the hours in which you could not start studying.

The strongest tool that works here is the implementation intention: turning the intention, instead of an abstract goal, into a sentence that answers the questions of when, where and how. A meta-analysis combining more than ninety tests shows that this kind of plan raises reaching the goal at a medium-to-large level.

In concrete form it goes like this: "If I come home from school and put down my bag, then I sit at the desk and open my math notebook."

Notice that the sentence does not say to study; it says to open the notebook. I described this in detail in the article on the first five minutes: shrinking the job to a ridiculous size lowers the threshold for starting, and after starting you often carry on.

The second tool is body doubling. Having someone beside you makes starting noticeably easier; the person does not help, they are just there. I opened this up in the article on body doubling. In the YKS process its counterpart takes the form of the library, a study hall or an online shared session.

How to study: two methods with evidence

A lot is said about study technique, but the evidence side is narrow. A broad review puts two of the tested methods far ahead.

Self-testing. Pulling information out of memory produces markedly stronger learning than rereading notes. Reading notes gives a feeling of familiarity; and familiarity does not bring information to an empty page in the exam. I wrote about this difference in the article on topic review.

Spaced repetition. Spreading the same amount of time over days instead of piling it into a single session increases durability. I covered the method in the article on spaced repetition.

On the ADHD side these two methods share a problem: both require a calendar. Remembering which topic to review when is exactly the area that is hard.

The solution is to hand remembering over to a system. When a topic is finished, the review days are written into the calendar at the same moment. The decision is made then, not on the review day.

Switching between subjects

This is the topic least talked about in YKS plans but the one that produces the most cost in ADHD.

Moving from one subject to another is a separate job, and that job requires executive function. I covered this in the article on difficulty with transitions: it takes time for the mind to leave one task and settle into another, and that time is subtracted from study time.

The practical result: a program that touches six different subjects in a day produces less work than a program that touches two. Because there are five switches in between and every switch produces a loss.

This is why it matters in the weekly loop to give a day to one or two subjects. Variety looks good for motivation; it is expensive for attention.

There is one exception: changing topics within the same subject is cheaper than moving to a different subject. So studying two separate topics on math day is not a problem.

Mock exams

The mock exam is the most misused tool in this process.

The common use is like a report card: a score comes out, you feel good or you feel bad, and you move on to the next mock exam. In this use the mock exam teaches nothing, it only measures.

The right use is as a diagnostic tool. After every mock exam three separate questions need to be asked.

Why are the blanks blank? Was it because time ran out, or because the topic was not known? These are completely different problems and need completely different solutions.

What kind are the wrong answers? From a gap in knowledge, from a calculation error, from misreading the question? In ADHD the third and second categories turn out more crowded than expected.

How was the time distributed? Did you stay a long time on a single question? I covered this in detail in the article on mock exams and time management: in ADHD, running out of time generally comes not from reading slowly but from not feeling the time that has passed.

The analysis needs to be done the same day; because while the mistake is still fresh you remember why it was made, whereas the next day often only the number of wrong answers is left.

Careless mistakes

This is what a student with ADHD meets most often in mock exam analysis: missing a question they knew.

Shifting the marking, not seeing a minus sign, skipping the word "not" in a "which of the following is not" question, making an error in the last step.

These are a direct appearance of the attention deficit and are not solved by the warning "be more careful." I described their form in working life in the article on careless mistakes at work; in the exam the mechanism is the same.

What works is a checklist: underlining the negative expression while reading the question, redoing the last step after finishing a calculation, reading the question number out loud when moving to the optical answer sheet.

These habits need to be built in the mock exam. A habit built on exam day does not hold.

Sleep

This heading needs to be added to the plan as a written item, because when it is not written it is the first thing sacrificed.

It is well documented that sleep loss is negatively related to learning and academic performance. On the ADHD side there is an extra layer: sleeplessness directly impairs attention, impulse control and emotion regulation, so it both imitates and worsens the symptoms.

There is a two-way relationship here and both directions are real. In ADHD the internal clock may be biologically shifted later; added to this is that a person who cannot find time for themselves during the day does not want to give up the night. I covered these two separately in the article on sleep and why we go to bed late.

The practical rule in the YKS process is this: study that runs late into the night takes away the whole of the next day. The two hours gained are smaller than the six hours lost.

If you use medication

If you are under treatment, there are a few points to take into account when planning the process, and all of them are topics to discuss with your doctor.

The range of the medication's effect across the day determines at what hour studying should be placed. If the effect fades in the late afternoon, evening study requires a different method.

The second point is mock exam and exam days. Not disturbing the routine is generally recommended; changing it on your own decision is not right.

The third is supply. In Türkiye there are periodic supply problems, and having them coincide with the exam period is a serious risk. I covered this in the article on supply; in short, you need to track the end date of the medication and book the prescription appointment in advance.

I will cover the relationship between medication and studying in more detail in a separate article. The part here is only how it fits into the annual plan.

ÖSYM exam accommodations

This item needs to go at the very start of the calendar, because once it is missed there is no making it up.

In ÖSYM exams an accommodation is requested with the form filled in during the application and the required report. The document has to arrive within the deadline; if it does not arrive, the candidate sits the exam under standard conditions.

I described the process step by step in the article on the ÖSYM application. Because getting a report also has its own time frame, this job starts months before the exam.

One caution: getting an accommodation does not solve everything. Extra time lengthens the time in the hall but has no effect on the difficulty during the preparation period. The two are separate topics.

When motivation drops

It will drop. In the middle of the year, probably several times.

What does not work here is waiting for motivation. In ADHD motivation does not run on a sense of importance but on four things: interest, novelty, urgency and challenge. I opened this up in the article on finding motivation.

The practical counterpart is to add one of these four to studying artificially. Changing the method produces novelty. Teaching someone produces challenge. Setting a short-term goal produces urgency.

There is also temptation bundling: allowing yourself a small thing you want very much only while you are studying. I wrote about the state of the evidence and the limits in the article on temptation bundling.

What falls to the family

I am writing this part for parents.

The thing that does the most harm is constant reminding. Reminding works in the short term but in the long term it makes the role permanent: one side becomes the reminder and the other the reminded, and when the reminding stops the system stops.

What works better is taking the reminding away from the person and handing it over to a shared system. A weekly loop hung on the wall works better than a reminding mother because it does not produce arguments.

The second point is how mock exam results are talked about. Feedback that ties the result to the person lowers performance. Instead of the sentence "you did not study this week," the sentence "most of the blanks are in the last ten questions, did the time run out" is both more accurate and more useful.

I covered the parent side separately in the article ADHD at school and university.

Choosing resources and changing resources

This is ADHD's quietest trap in the YKS process.

At the start of the year a resource is chosen. Two months later that resource is thought to be inadequate and a new one is bought. In the fourth month a friend mentions another publisher, and that one is bought too. By the sixth month there are six books on the shelf and none of them is finished.

This behavior does not come from laziness. Buying a new resource gives a reward immediately: the feeling of having started something, clean pages, the sense that this time it will work. Using it gives no reward.

The mechanism is the same as what I described in the article on app hunting. There the tool is digital, here it is paper; the behavior is the same.

The way out is not finding a better resource. It is to keep using the existing resource in its sufficiently bad state. Because the difference in quality among the resources on the market is much smaller than the difference between a finished resource and an unfinished one.

The practical rule: the resource chosen at the start of the year is not changed. If it will be changed, the reason is written down, and if the reason is "I got bored," it is not changed.

The second rule: one resource per subject. A question bank is not counted separately; there should be a single lesson text.

Overlap between school and preparation

In the twelfth grade school and preparation become rivals, and this conflict is especially expensive in ADHD.

The common solution is absenteeism. Not going to school and giving that day to preparation. On paper it is logical: the six hours spent at school may produce less yield than three hours at home.

In reality it often does not work, and the reason sits right at the center of ADHD.

School, even a bad one, is an external structure. It sets the wake-up time, divides the day, provides being among other people. When this structure is withdrawn, what has to be built in its place is the person's own structure, and this is exactly what is hardest to build in ADHD.

In most students who skip school, that day is not spent on preparation. They wake up late, the day scatters, the guilt begins in the evening.

A better setup: going to school but counting the time at school as part of preparation. Solving questions in free periods, looking at review cards during break, reviewing a topic during lunch. These look small but they add up to an hour a day, and that hour is not stolen from anywhere.

There is also this: listening at school is cheaper than watching the same topic on video at home. A live lesson has external structure; a video does not. I wrote about this difference in the article on online classes.

Social life and loneliness

The common advice in the exam year is this: cut your social life, sacrifice a year.

This advice is especially risky for a student with ADHD, for two reasons.

The first is the need for stimulation. When social contact is cut, that need does not disappear; it comes out through another channel. It generally comes out through the phone, and the phone takes far more time than having coffee with a friend. I wrote about this mechanism in the article on stimulation seeking.

The second is the body-doubling effect. A friend you study with provides both social contact and an easier start. I covered this in the article on body doubling. Cutting social life entirely cuts off this resource as well.

A better setup: instead of cutting social life, write it into the plan. A fixed weekly slot, decided in advance, that produces no guilt. Rest that is not written into the plan becomes stolen rest, and stolen rest does not rest you.

The preference period

The year ends, the exam is taken, and a week begins for which most people are not prepared.

Making the preference list is a job that creates a separate difficulty in ADHD: many options, irreversible and timed. The picture that appears when all three are present is what I described in the article on analysis paralysis.

There are a few rules that work.

Narrow the options in advance. Before the exam, before the score is known, write the departments you are interested in on a list. After the score is announced, the list is shortened; it is not built from zero.

Write down the decision criteria. Is the city important, or the department, or the scholarship? Ranking the three criteria in advance removes the hours-long deliberation in the preference week.

Do not leave it to the last day. The preference system gets crowded on the last day, and in ADHD the last day is already the riskiest day.

The last month

The last month has a single rule: no new topics.

This rule is especially important in ADHD, because looking for new resources in the last month is the most common form of avoidance. Buying a new book, trying a new method, starting a new topic; all three give the feeling of studying and all three do harm at that stage.

This is the counterpart of app hunting in exam preparation.

What is done in the last month is review and rehearsal. Solving mock exams at the exam's hours, picturing the exam morning a few times, preparing the bag in advance. I covered this in detail in the article on exam morning.

Differences between fields: quantitative, equal weight, verbal

The three fields have different difficulties from the point of view of ADHD, and the plan changes accordingly.

Field	Dominant load	Where ADHD struggles	Effect on the plan
Quantitative (Sayısal)	Multi-step calculation	Losing the intermediate result, scattering in a long question	Daily question solving is a must, long gaps are harmful
Equal weight (Eşit Ağırlık)	Two different mental modes	The cost of switching between math and verbal	Not putting both modes on the same day
Verbal (Sözel)	Heavy reading and memorizing	Not registering what you read, getting bored with monotony	Short sessions, frequent change of method

Equal weight is the field that needs the most attention, because two different kinds of work take place within the same day. The cost I described in the article on difficulty with transitions is paid here several times a day.

The practical solution: in equal weight, split the week in two, not the day. Certain days of the week quantitative, certain days verbal. Not changing mode within a day.

In the verbal field the opposite holds: studying the same kind of thing for a long time lowers the level of arousal. There you need to change the method within the day; from reading the topic to solving questions, from solving questions to drawing diagrams.

Daily continuity in quantitative subjects

In the quantitative field there is a rule specific to ADHD: taking a break is expensive.

The reason is this. Math and science questions require a skill, and skills dull quickly when not used. On a topic left alone for three days, the first five questions solved on the fourth day go to warming up.

This is true for everyone but the difference grows in ADHD, because the warm-up time also gets longer.

The practical result: in the quantitative field the daily share can be small, but it should be every day. Ten questions a day produce more work than seventy questions on one day a week.

In the verbal subjects this rule is looser; there, spaced repetition already requires spreading over time.

If the plan collapses

It can collapse, and if it does, what you do is not start over.

It can be rescued with three questions. Which week broke? When it broke, which item could not be carried? If that item is removed, can the loop run?

Most of the time the answer is yes. The plan was too full; when one item is taken out it becomes carryable.

The most common mistake here is putting a tighter plan in the place of the collapsed one. A tighter plan collapses faster, and every collapse makes the next attempt harder.

My takeaway

The one-sentence conclusion of this article is this: build the plan around the bad days, not the successful days. Because within a year, there are more bad days than good ones.

After a plan collapses, the first thing that comes to mind is often tightening the plan: adding hours, leaving yourself less room. This means taking the cause of the collapse to be time. Yet the problem is not time; it is trying to carry a year with a single push of willpower.

The information here is a general framework. Diagnosis and treatment decisions are confirmed with your doctor, and details about the exam application are confirmed with the current ÖSYM guide.