HOW CAN YOU REVISE?

The exams are looming over us now and revision is pestering us for attention. With Easter just round the bend we must all get our act together ready to pull it out of the bag for these exams. No matter what stage you’re at, GCSEs, A-levels…these exams sure matter and revision needs to be turned up at its max over these final few weeks. So how exactly can you revise?

You might be one of those lucky ones who kept of top of their workload throughout the year, feeling pretty confident that you’re ahead of the game right now; or you might be the polar opposite, someone who’s going to be relying on superhuman cramming (not something I would recommend!) over these final weeks. Either way, focus, concentration and determination are going to be key to getting you through this exam season and could possibly make the difference of a good few grades for you.

Firstly, it’s important to say that there’s no set way to revise…you have hopefully worked out the techniques and tactics that work best for you now and are gearing through with them. However, even though nobody can truly dictate what you can do to get top marks in an exam there are a few things that will be universally applicable to every single one of you no matter what you’re revising for or how you like to revise.

So here are my 3 top tips…

1. Get organised

Pull yourself together, buy yourself a weekly planner and plan out what you’re going to revise. Familiarise yourself with exactly how much of the syllabus you’ve got left to get through in class and how much you’ve got left to power through independently. After you’ve done that you can space out all of your work in order to maximise your intake of the content. Schedule in recaps and ways that you can test that what you’re doing is actually working. Don’t make the mistake of not planning your revision because then you risk the disaster of running out of time. Imagine the exam being tomorrow and you only having gone through half of the syllabus…not an ideal situation!

2. Remove all distractions

Come one, let’s be blatantly honest here. Revision certainly isn’t the most exhilarating of activities. When you revise its pretty fair to say every single other activity, no matter how unappealing they would seem on a normal day would seem like swimming in paradise to you then. You know you’ll suddenly feel the urge to browse the web for a whole evening or scroll through Instagram. So why make it difficult for yourself? Either turn your phone off, move it to a different room or just throw it as hard as you can at a wall. Only joking, definitely don’t smash your phone! But in all seriousness you really need to find a way that works for you. You could temporarily delete all your social media, turn off the internet…but whatever you choose to do, you need to achieve that atmosphere of extreme focus.

3. Practice! Practice! Practice!

This is so important. Yes, you can spend hours and hours on end memorising everything to the extent that you can recite the textbook word for word, but how is that really going to help? I for one have never come across an exam question asking me to spew out the contents of ‘page 32’ from the Biology textbook. That’s definitely not how it works…far from it actually. You will be expected to apply your knowledge, all the facts that you learnt will be presented within weird and wonderful scenarios…so why not prepare for them? The more you tackle these beastly questions, the better you’ll get…I guarantee it!

I hope you’ve found these tips useful and I hope they do help to make sure your revision is as efficient as can be.

Good luck to you all!