Revision: The 5 Quick Fixes

Written by Tim Williams, author of 167 Exam Secrets.

With exams just around the corner, here are 5 top tips to maximise your revision technique in a short amount of time. If you are looking for some extra revision help join one of webinars for Maths and Physics https://events.faria.org/?product=osc

1. Make connections about the information you’re trying to learn. You can try and connect facts to each other, or attach extra information to facts you know well, or put information into a framework you already understand. But trying to remember facts without understanding them is very difficult and almost pointless.
2. Divide a topic into half a dozen sections and study them over different weeks. That way you get more practice thinking about the items of information. So, you take ‘Cells’ in Biology and study their structure one week, the different kinds of cells next week, processes within cells next week. Etc…
3. Repeated short tests are very effective. It looks as though it’s the effort of trying to retrieve information that makes it stick in your head, not just seeing or repeating it. So, if you can find a way to give yourself tests once a week on the difficul
   t topics, that will help. Looking at lots of past papers is effectively doing this.
4. Study early rather than late. Okay, a lot of complications here, but it’s fairly clear that if you have a lot of work to do it’s much better to get up early and do it, than to stay up late. If you stay up late, you think you’re working, but actually you monitor yourself badly, you have micro-sleeps without knowing, your recall rate goes down, and your performance the next day usually suffers.
5. Change the form of the information in some way. Just looking at it, or reading it, is pointless. You can turn text into diagrams, you can make a chapter into a mind map; you could explain it to a friend or your little brother; you can make a mnemonic; you could create a test on it to give to a friend—just do something with it. On the next page, there are two examples of how you can do something with your written notes…