Planning your Revision
The most important thing is to be realistic and honest. You need to be realistic in that making a plan which you have no hope of following is pointless. And you need to be honest in that making a plan that assumes that you will be out of bed by 8am on the day after your 18th Birthday party is almost certainly a lie you are telling yourself.
The Big Picture Plan
This is essentially working out what days and how much time you have available for revision - revision here meaning revision you do on your own. You should have a sheet that looks like the following:
If not you can download one from here: The Big Picture Planning Sheet
The first thing to do is to mark in days you know that revision won’t be an option – the column marked "Events". This shouldn’t include "weekends 'cause I can’t be arsed" but rather things like "best friend’s birthday" or "Great Uncle Jeff’s 5th wedding" you can even have a couple of specials like "watching cup final" – but only a couple. So it should include things that you can’t really miss or really want to do.
So you could end up with something like:
So what does this tell us? Well if you end up with an average of 20 minutes a day then perhaps you have too much else on, maybe a few of the 7 parties you have planned for April need to go or 12 hours a week in the gym is too much. The idea of this exercise is to get a rough idea of how much time you really have. The exams might seem a long way off, but in reality you probably have less time than you think – life gets in the way.
Most students find that exams seem to arrive rather suddenly, one week they feel like they are in the distant future, the next they seem just a couple of days away.
Once you have done your big picture plan you should have a fair idea of how many hours you have to dedicate to revision and therefore how many hours per subject or module. You could just divide the hours equally between the subjects – but this may not be the best use of your time. For example if you have a subject which you are very confident in, e.g. Russian GCSE if you are a Russian or if you have a subject which just isn’t that important, General Studies, which no one takes seriously, you may wish to divide your time up differently.
Suppose you have 100 hours for 4 A levels, but one is General Studies, you might split the time 30/30/30/10 with just 10 hours for General Studies (which still maybe too much!).
The Little Picture Plan
You’ve done your big picture plan and you know roughly how many hours you have per subject then you need to think about how you split this time up on a day to day basis. As a very rough rule the longer you work without break the less you retain, so if you work for 8 hours without a break, by hour 8 you will retain only a small percentage of what you have studied. For most people working for 8 hours without a break is rather pointless – there are much more efficient and significantly less painful ways of working.
For most students revision sessions of around 40-50 minutes seem to work well, much less than 35 minutes is getting rather short and much more than 90 minutes is heading towards too much. Pick whatever seems best for you. You should work for 50 minutes (or whatever) then take a break of 10 minutes (more if you do longer sessions, less if you do shorter). So you might have a day’s timetable that looks like the following:
Now this is only a suggestion, but what is key is that you actually work for the time that you are claiming that you are going to work. Don’t let your timings drift, i.e. 50 minutes means 50 minutes, it's no good saying “I’ve done over half an hour, that’ll do” – if you are thinking along those lines then shorten your sessions – don’t lie to yourself, it’s pointless.
I would suggest that a stopwatch or better still a countdown timer is the way to go. Set the timer for 50 minutes (or whatever) and don’t stop until the time is up. Make sure you have removed all distractions – that includes your mobile, msn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. I know it is hard to believe but the world doesn’t end if you don’t check Facebook every five minutes or reply to texts instantly; neither will all your friend desert you – if they do they don’t really qualify as friends.
Now suppose that you opt for the 50 minutes study with a 10 minute break – this could, for example, give you a day that looks like the following:
