Superior Success in Learning and Exams

Baltaş tells the book's backstory in the preface: during a doctorate in neurology, Baltaş was invited by education pioneer İbrahim Arıkan to set up the first genuine counselling service at a Turkish cram school. Published in 1989, the book was considered «revolutionary» for bridging the physiological and biological basis of learning and students' needs. Twenty-eight years on, Baltaş writes, the core truth hasn't changed: good education rests on good teachers.

The introduction opens with a critique of Turkish education. Baltaş notes that some English language schools don't correct students' errors because fear of mistakes stops them speaking. The formula sticks: education happens not by «catching mistakes» but by «catching what's right». Another example concerns sleep: a short review before bed helps newly learned material settle into memory. The author also stresses that threats like «study or you'll amount to nothing» don't work, and that raising anxiety makes learning harder at a biochemical level.

The book's central claim is that students need a systematic method rather than a vague «study!». The method adapts Robinson's SQ3R and the Hopson–Anderson approach to Turkish conditions. The reading technique is called İSOAT — Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review in Turkish. The student skims the text first, then writes questions, marks the text while reading, writes answers on cards, then recites them in their own words and reviews. It still works today and is the book's most valuable practical part.

Part I discusses how education affects quality of life. Baltaş argues that luck explains no success: «luck is standing at the right angle at the right time». Next come tips from Richard Wiseman's research on lucky people — positive expectations, finding the upside of bad luck, creating opportunities, listening to your inner voice — followed by an explanation of how education «breaks the moulds» in our heads, using Maslow's line that «if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail». The section ends with «we think only with what we know».

The dated parts are here too. A section on «careers with a bright future» says law, medicine and pharmacy have lost prestige, while electronics, shipping and private-sector teaching are the careers of the future. «A Changing World» predicts supercomputers surpassing the human brain by 2013 and $100 computers by 2049. Later editions updated some facts, but the text has not been consistently revised and layers from different years show through.

Still, the format is very student-friendly: each chapter opens with goals and questions and closes with a summary, and the scales let students assess their study habits and exam anxiety. The author openly notes that the study-behaviour and exam-anxiety scales have not been validated and are only indicative — an honest caveat.

• Goals, questions and a summary in every chapter, structured like a textbook
• Step-by-step study and reading methods
• A separate guide for teachers running seminars