Revision Tips - Balance of Revision and Free Time

Exam time is now even closer and things are becoming a lot more stressful than they were 2 weeks ago, so it is important to get the balance right between your free time and the amount of time you spend revising. If you spend too long focusing on working hard and not enough time relaxing, you could risk overloading yourself with too much pressure. I have put together a few things you can do in the run up to exams to ensure you are getting the balance right and giving yourself the best chance to stay fit and healthy.

Dedicate 1 day a week as a rest day.

Taking a rest day is something you find many is included in exercise plans as it is important that you don’t over use the muscles in your body and injure yourself. Although the brain is an organ, it is still vital that you allow it time to recover from the strain of studying hard. By dedicating a rest day once a week it also allows your brain to start transferring some of the information into your Long-term memory, so when you come to revise the topic again you remember more than you did the previous time. Therefore, instead of feeling guilty about spending one evening a week watching your favorite TV series or going out with your friends, you should think about the positive impacts it is going to have on your overall health and revision success.

Take a long shower / bath whenever you can.

By this I don’t mean you need to constantly be in the bath or shower, but aim for every night or as many times a week as you can. Taking a long bath or shower is not only relaxing and hygienic, but also allows you time to think and go over ideas that you may have. For example, you may have had a full day of lessons at school and when you get into your bath you find yourself thinking about all the new things you have learnt. Doing this allows you to start rehearsing some of the information you have learnt, which is psychologically proven to help transfer information into the long-term memory. I understand that when you’re in the bath the first thing you think about probably isn’t school work, but I often find that if I have been working on something or there is something I am planning to work on after my bath I find myself thinking about it without even realizing, so putting in that little bit more effort to think of new concepts and theories can be really beneficial to your studies without being too stressful. You might even surprise yourself at how much you already remember!

Make sure you are getting enough sleep.

A bad habit that a lot of students have during exam season is to stay up until early hours of the morning studying as they think it will help them. However, it is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help as it will leave you feeling sluggish and tired during the day. Unfortunately for teenagers it is a proven fact that out body clocks are programmed to want to stay up all night and sleep all day, however it is not practical – especially when you need to be in school by 8:30am. In order to give yourself the best chance during the exam season make sure you are getting 9-10 hours’ sleep a night, it may sound like a lot but, it is scientifically proven to be just the right amount for a teenager. So instead of staying up until 2am revising go to sleep muc earlier and you will have more time during the day to study and a higher chance of retaining the information.

Drink plenty of water.

This seems like a really obvious thing to do, but you would be surprised how many people forget to properly hydrate themselves when working hard, myself included. If you don’t stay hydrated, you may find yourself developing a headache or feeling run down very quickly. A good tip I have is to download an app that keeps track of how much you have drank during the day and reminds you every hour to have a drink. Doing this means you’re going to make sure you can work to your full potential and not have to stop feeling rundown or with a nasty headache.

That is going to be it for the revision tips series as exams are now well underway for most people! If you have any other tips or ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments as they will be very useful to anyone reading. I also want to wish anyone who is taking exams this year the best of luck and remember as long as you do your best, you will succeed. 

Revision Tips - Method

In today’s post about revision tips I am going to be talking to you about the different methods you can use in order to revise for the upcoming exams. I find that that a lot of people including myself have not fully mastered the art of revision and are often stuck on effective ways to get information to stay in your head. I have come up with my top 3 ideas and hope that you find them helpful.

Method 1:

Cue Cards are a great way to simplify your notes and make you less reliant on big chunks of writing. You can purchase the cards shown in the picture from most supermarkets and stationery shops in varying different sizes. The way in which I use these is to write a key study, theory or term on one side and then a few bullets points on the other side explaining the study, theory or term. These can then be used to test yourself over and over again, until you know the answers off by heart. You can also use these to test your friends who take the same subjects as you and have mini discussions which help your understanding of the subject. You can make these cue cards as colourful and pretty as you want, but you don’t want to spend too long decorating as that won’t be helping with your revision at all.

Method 2:

Mind Maps are another way in which you can simplify your notes. Take an A4 piece of paper and draw out your mind map, but limit yourself to only 6 branches (you may be recommended more or less by your teachers depending on the subject you are taking. I am basing this on psychology) as this will allow you to have enough space to get the maximum details you would need for the high grades, but also stops you from crowding on lots of unnecessary information. When I do these mind maps I like to start by making one purely based on my current knowledge of the topic and fill in as much as I can before using my notes to fill in anything that’s missing as this allows me to see which areas I need to focus on more with other methods.

Method 3

Completing past exam papers and questions is a great way to revise for upcoming exams. Not only does it give you the opportunity to practice the topics you revising, but it also helps to improve your exam technique at the same time. If you ae tackling a topic you find particularly challenging I would recommend taking your time and using your notes to help you answer the questions as this would be more beneficial than missing it out under timed conditions. You can then compare the answer you came up with to the mark scheme and examiners reports to see the areas that you could improve on for next time. If you are confident with your topics then the best way to use exam papers is to sit them under timed conditions as it allows you to prepare fully for the exam and tailor your revision around how much you can write in the allocated time. Again you can use the examiners reports and mark schemes to mark your own paper, or a friends paper as these are really useful for pointing out mistakes that can easily be avoided and areas to focus on. Of course most teachers will be happy to go through and mark any extra exam papers and questions you have completed and offer you ways you can improve ready for the real deal in summer!

Revision Tips – Schedule

Today I thought I would start a little series about revision tips and tricks as exam season is approaching which means it is definitely time to start revising if you want to do well. I am in my second year of 6^th form which means I will be leaving school this summer after completing my A2 exams. In total I have 5 A2 exams and 2 AS exams alongside that as I made the decision to resit two papers to boost my overall A-Level grade. Last year I started my revision a little bit later than I should have and probably could have used my time a lot better, but this year I am feeling confident that I am starting early enough to fit everything in without rushing and also have better plans for how I am going to distribute my time. I decided I would share how I plan my revision schedule with you, as it may help some people out who have upcoming exams and don’t know how to balance their time.

The first thing I did when making my revision schedule is work out how much time I have to spend revising and when. I did this by creating myself a simple table which you can see in the image below and putting in any lessons I had and other commitments such as work along with the hours I wanted to remain free and flexible. 

After doing this it makes it a lot easier to see how much time you have per week to fit in revision. For me I have 28 hours per week for revising which sounds daunting when you look at it like that, but of course you can have as many or little hours as you wish. At this point you can either go ahead and fill all these revision slots up with the subject you are going to focus on at that point, or you can carefully plan out exactly how you’re going to use the time you have to get the best results. I have tried to keep this planning process as simple as possible as I want everyone to be able to give themselves the best schedule they can. If you follow the 6 Steps below you will be able to create a perfectly planned revision schedule to help ace your exams.

Step 1:

List all of the topic areas you need to cover for each subject and add up how many topics you have in total. I do 3 subjects and altogether this means I have 70 little topics to focus on before exams! 

Step 2:

Work out how many weeks you have until your exams begin. For me I have 10 weeks of school and 3 weeks of holidays (I only make a schedule for school weeks) and then multiply this by the amount of hours you will be spending on revision per week. For me this is 28 X 10 = 280. This is how many hours of revision you have between now and your exams. Now the 70 topics don’t seem that scary right?

Step 3:

When revising you want to make sure you are going over each topic multiple times in order to transfer the information to your long term memory. In order to work out how many times you can visit each subject you divide your total number of hours (280 for me) by your total amount of topics (70 for me) which leaves you with a smaller number – the amount of times you can revisit a topic. These don’t always work as rounded figures, so you may have to adapt them slightly.

Step 4:

You can now use all these numbers you have produced to decide how many hours per week you should be spending on each subject. For example, I take 3 subjects that all have a different amount of topics. (Travel = 10, Psychology = 32 and Sociology = 28). To do this you need to divide your number of topics altogether by total number of topics per subject. For example Travel = 70 divided by 10 = 7. You divide your total number of hours spent revising a week by the answer you just worked out. ( 28 divided by 7 = 4) This gives you how many hours you should spend on that subject each week in order to repeat it the amount of times you previously worked out.

Step 5:

Once you have made all these calculations you can then start filling out your schedule making sure you are including the subject and topic you will be focusing on. When doing this I found it useful to tick the topics off as I added them in, so by the time I finished all by topics were ticked off 4 times and I knew I hadn’t missed anything out.

Step 6:

This final step is optional as not everyone is a fan of coloured schedules, but think adding colour is helpful to distinguish between subjects and topics, depending on which you would prefer. On my schedule I have colour coded on topic area, rather than subject but you can do it in whichever way works best for you.