The start of the new academic year can be daunting, filled with new topics, lessons, teachers, classes, and more. If you’re in year 11 or 13, the daunting prospects of public exams may be looming over you. How should you revise for the exams? Where do you even start?
Don’t worry, we got you covered. Today we’ll explain how you can develop the perfect revision strategy to optimise your revision, target your weaknesses, and conquer your exams!
Identify your weaknesses
The first thing to do is find out what your strengths and weaknesses are. There are two best ways to do this:
- Go through the specification for your subjects in your specific exam board. These will breakdown and list out everything you need to know for every topic in every subject. Look through them to see which areas you seem comfortable with, and which ones give you the sinking feeling in your stomach when you just look at them!
- Find some practice papers on your subjects and do them. You don’t even need to do them in exam conditions. Just go through all the questions and see which ones you’re able to easily, with some difficulties, or not at all.
After completing the above, you should have been able to find out which topics your strengths and weaknesses.
However, before you can develop a timetable, we still need to break this down further.
Breakdown
When it comes to succeeding in exams, there are many aspects you need to master. Subject knowledge and conceptual understanding is one, but so are memorising formulas for STEM subjects, important quotes or points in literature subjects, familiarising yourself with the mark scheme, perfecting your exam technique, and more. All of these are important elements to master if you truly want to excel in your exams.
For each topic area you identified as a weakness in the above section, now try to think about what exactly this weakness is. Is it your subject knowledge, recalling/use of formulas, exam technique, or something else?
Once you have identified all the elements of all the topics you need to work on, now we can move on to the next step.
Planning
Now that you know what exactly you need to work on, the only thing left to do is schedule an appropriate amount of time to work on each task. You can do this in various ways, such as ranking how confident you are in each topic. The ones you are least confident in are the ones you’ll need to spend the most time on.
You can take a calendar week, month, term, or even a year, and break down the available time you have into periods where you work on each of the areas you identified above. This way, you will systematically cover everything that you need by providing yourself with ample time for each section.
Last, but not least
The importance of a routine cannot be understated. Human beings are creatures of habit, and when we do the same thing each day, it will become that much easier to continue doing the same things in the future. Whether it be waking up and going to sleep at a particular time, starting and finishing work at a particular time, or anything else, just make sure to find a routine that works for you, is easy to maintain, and actually maintain it.
Finally, and most importantly, remember to take care of your physical and mental health. Remember that as important as GCSE and A-level exams are, they are not the end of the world, and taking care of yourself and your health is always the most important thing.