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 6th 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.
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