A student’s ultimate guide: 5 tips for effective exam revision

As we are getting closer to exam season I thought I would give you my 5 top tips for revising.

Past papers and practice questions

Exams test how well you can apply the knowledge and the only way to get better at that is to practice. the way that I did it was: do the papers without your books and then look at which topics your didn’t do the best on and prioritise that with revision. then go through and memorise the answers to the common questions that come up i.e if there is always a question around osmosis, learn the mark scheme for those questions.

Break it up!

Most textbook split the course into chapters these can be a good start but also can be very big still. try and split it up even more. i.e. in history, split an era into sections of years or big events and work through it that way. splitting topics into smaller parts makes revising it seem a lot less daunting. 3 pages is a lot easier to start than 15 ! I also rated how confident I was on each of these sections, using how well I was on past papers as well as a few other metrics.

Create a timetable

This goes hand in hand with the above tip. by planning your revision you can ensure that you are able to do everything. I always struggled with not being in the mood for revising a certain subject so I would create a list of the small parts I wanted to go over that week, this gave me choices as to what to study each day, making it much more likely I would actually do it.depending on how you study best you can plan accordingly. i.e if you prefer pomodoro studying. designate how many pomodoros you will do and what you will cover in each one.

Take breaks

As much as studying is important, looking after yourself also is. sitting and forcing yourself to focus for hours on endwhen you brain needs a break is not going to do you any good. moving around , getting a drink and a snack and taking a coupledeep breaths does wonders for you. even if its 5 – 10 mins away from your desk your brain and body will thank you!

Take breaks

This is a study technique where you write out everything you know about a topic in a set time frame ie 5/10 mins. after that you would go through with your notes / textbook and correct and incorrect info and add parts that you missed. this is a great tool to use in exams as well for those big marker questions as it helps you get in the habit of writing out everything related to a topic. thenyou can pick the relevant information and use it. by repeating these every so often it helps build up your long term memory. I would also use how much i could recall and how much i got wrong in my rankings of how well i knew each topic.

Of course there are so many more tips but I wanted to give the ones I felt were the most important!

Find more tips

If you are looking for more tips, check out our guide to effective revision for exams, with advice from the experts.