1. Get together a revision timetable on the first day of study leave.
Just do it. Don’t argue. Don’t procrastinate. Just do the thing. And do it first. Do it on the first day, and once you’ve done it, agree it with your parents. There is a reason for this…
If you get your parents to agree to the schedule, you can write break/relaxation periods into it. You can explain to your parents that you need all day off on Saturday and Wednesday evenings too. They’ll be so chuffed that you’ve got a revision schedule together they’ll agree to anything. Another advantage is that when you are taking a timetabled relaxation/rest break and they go, “What do you think you’re doing watching the telly? Haven’t you got revision to do?” You can point at the timetabled break session on your revision timetable, raise your eyebrows and give them a smug smile. They will back down and you will have won.
2. Revise the subjects you hate in the morning
Think of double maths, RE – whatever it is you hate. Now think of doing this for the first two lessons in the morning. Yeuch! There’s worse though! Think of doing it last two lessons on a Friday afternoon as you gaze at the minute hand of the clock as it stubbornly refuses to move. Beyond double yeuch!!
It is easier to stomach the stuff you don’t much like in the morning.
Successful people in all walks of life attribute their success to one simple technique: if you have a set of jobs to do, you do the most difficult thing, the thing you hate, first. This means when you’ve just got up. Don’t save up the stuff you hate. It’ll haunt you if you do, and make your life miserable.
3. Reading is useless…until you add some colour
You can’t do decent revision through sitting with a boring textbook willing the information to go into your head. It will sit stubbornly, remaining in the textbook, refusing to make the jump into your head.
You have to do something with the information. Take notes, underline stuff, invest in a set of highlighters and colour code everything that moves, do drawings and put pieces of information into table form. If you do something with the information it will stay in your head way better than if you just sat there reading.
4. Manage your time properly in the exam
This is the most vital of all techniques. The nasty spinsters who sit in drafty attics devising fresh new exam tortures are nothing if not clever. They have loads of different ways of tripping you up. The one they use most often is to make you spend way too much time on the first question. Be wary of this! Many very clever students blow their chances by spending an hour on the first question when it is only worth two marks.
Make sure you spend the most time on the questions that have the most marks. Often these are the last ones, and there is a very solid argument for looking at the paper first, seeing which questions carry the fat marks, and doing these first.
5. Answer the question
The answer to the question, ‘Who won the FA Cup in 2006?’ is not, and will never be, ‘My mum.’ ‘My mum’ may well be an answer, but it is an answer to a completely different question. (‘Who buys all your clothes?’)
Make sure you answer the question in front of you, not some other question you’ve made up, because that question is asking you for things you know. Do this by underlining three key words per question and checking with yourself that you know – exactly – what is being asked for.
6. Plan your answer
Think about a wedding. If it wasn’t planned properly, then the bride and the groom would turn up at different churches, the priest would have taken the day off in any case, and there’d tears before bedtime.
The same thing applies to any essay work you have to write in an exam. Fail to plan and you plan to fail.
Brainstorm your ideas, mark each idea with the paragraph number they go in, and only then should you go about writing the essay. Make sure your plan is on the exam paper, where the examiner can see it. As a math’s teacher might say, “Always show your workings.”
7. Check your paper
If an exam is one-and-a-half hours long, you have exactly one-and-a-half hours to squeeze every mark you can out of it. If you find yourself towards the end of an exam, lounging in your chair trying to catch your mate’s attention in the next row, wake up! You are sabotaging your own chances. There is only one mark’s difference between a ‘C’ and a ‘D’, an ‘A’ and an ‘A*’. Checking your paper at the end could be the thing that gives you that one, crucial mark.
8. Use positive self-talk
People who tell themselves they can’t do things invariably find that they are right. People who tell themselves they can are right too. During your revision and during the exam itself, keep telling yourself, “I can do this.” You’ll find you can.
9. Take your time
When the examiner says, “You may turn your papers over now,” everyone else in the room will try and do so at the pace an Olympic sprinter leaves the blocks. Don’t do this. It puts you in a stressful state right at the beginning, and saves you exactly 0.41 seconds, (which is a useless amount of time to save). When the examiner says to turn your paper over, don’t. Take a breath, count to ten, then do it. You are the one in control of your destiny. Stay calm and focused.
10. Do your best
That’s all you should ask of yourself. If, at the end of the day, you are able to honestly say to yourself that have done your best, you have a right to be happy with yourself no matter what the grade. No one has any right to ask any more of you. Nor will they.
Compiled by Secondary School Teacher of the Year in 2004, Phil Beadle
Planning
- Find out the date of the examination. How many weeks are there before the exam?
- Find out exactly which topics you are going to be examined on. You may find it useful to look at the Subject Specification from the examination board. These can be downloaded from the examination board website. (Scottish SQA here)
- Decide which topics you are going to revise. You may not have time to revise them all, or you may feel that you know a topic well and do not need to revise it. Conversely, you may feel that you’ll never be able to grasp a particular topic. It happens, but don’t do this with more than one topic.
- Now, with the help of a calendar, make a revision plan. Decide when you are going to revise each topic. Start with topics you find easiest and aim to finish revision about a week before the exam.
- Stick to the revision plan.
Revision Sessions
There are many different techniques for revising. You might like to experiment with a few to find out which of these work best for you.
- Rather than just reading through notes, it can be useful to highlight key points as you read.
- Try to summarise a topic in a short as space as possible, such as a side of A4 paper. Record cards can also be useful for this: they are also portable.
- Rather than producing a summary after reading through notes, start by writing down all the key points you remember about a topic and then checking these by referring to your notes.
- Many good revision guides are available. However, I think it is better to produce your own summary rather than to rely on someone else’s.
- Some students find mind maps (also known as spider diagrams) useful. I don’t.
- Looking at questions from past papers can be useful. However, unless time is short, do not rely exclusively on this.
Most students will probably use a combination of these techniques. Varying revision activities is likely to make the sessions less tedious. However, I did teach a physics student who revised for A’ level by copying his notes, word for word. I don’t recommend that technique, but it worked for him: he obtained a grade A.
The Evening Before The Examination
Go to the cinema! Few students take this advice, but I don’t think that there is much that can be done at the last minute, particularly if you have revised thoroughly during the preceding weeks.
Paul Goddard’s blog here
“Growl. All over the country, teenagers are being told to prepare themselves for the coming onslaught, so we have drawn up 10 strategies that will help them launch an effective revision campaign over the Easter holidays.
1 Go away
Come Easter, Oxford is teeming with young, school-age revisers, not only studying but staying the night at some of the well-known university colleges (Brasenose, Jesus, Lady Margaret Hall). Providers of these residential courses include Oxford Science Studies (01865 240637; www.oxss.co.uk), Oxford Tutorial College (01865 793333; www.otc.ac.uk), Cherwell College (01865 242670; www.cherwell-college.co.uk) and Magdalen College School (01865 242191; www.mcsoxford.org) Courses last from three to five days and cost around £800.
2 Synchronise watches
Revision is most effective when done in timed 45 minute bursts, with a 10-minute break in between. That way, you don’t fall asleep at your post. The best way to stick to this is to post your timetable in a public place (the fridge door works well). That way, not only you, but the rest of your family, know the times when you are meant to be studying.
3 Start early
The mind is much more alert first thing in the morning. Also, it means you can get your day’s revising out of the way by lunchtime. Start with the subject you like least, while your powers are still at their strongest.
4 Request reinforcement
In the form of a two to five-day, non-residential revision course, at one of the permanent colleges run by Alpha Plus (020 7487 6000; www.alphaplusgroup.co.uk) or Mander Portman Woodward (020 7835 1355; www.mpw.co.uk), or at one of the 22 different school locations hired by Justin Craig Educational (0845 060 6555; www.justincraig.ac.uk)
Alternatively, you can attend revision courses run by Harrow School (020 8426 4638; www.harrowschoolenterprises.com) or Clifton College in Bristol (0117 315 7669; www.cliftoncollegeuk.com) You get 12-18 hours of small-group tuition, starting at around £350 per subject. Make sure the course can cover the material that is relevant to the exam board that your child is taking, though. You don’t want exclusively Edexcel when you should be doing AQA, or WJEC when it should be OCR.
5 Cut radio contact
Otherwise known as switch off your mobile phone. Incoming calls and texts are just too tempting, especially if the alternative is memorising irregular verbs. Turn off the computer, too, unless you are visiting revision website www.s-cool.co.uk where you get given lots and lots of nice green ticks when you get the answers right.
6 Forge alliances
Revising with friends is a good way of reinforcing what you do know and finding out what you don’t. At its most basic level, you can test each other on vocabulary. On a loftier plane, you can play the part of historical figures, for example, one can be Charles I and the other Cromwell.
7 Fly in mercenaries
Otherwise known as home tutors. The good part about having one-to-one tuition is that you aren’t afraid to ask questions that might make you look stupid in class, for example, what’s the difference between the Renaissance and the Reformation?
The bad part, from a parental point of view, is that it’s quite expensive; anything from £25 to £50 an hour. Either ask your school to suggest a tutor, or go to a big agency like Fleet (01252 371731; www.fleet-tutors.co.uk), which can supply bona fide qualified and Criminal Records Bureau-checked teachers (many websites are just noticeboards that don’t apply any quality control). A good way of keeping costs down is to share the tutor with another child (ideally one of your child’s classmates).
8 Boost morale
It helps motivation to have a treat or two lined up at the end of a revision session: a favourite snack, a favourite lunch, or a favourite pre-taped television programme all cued up and ready.
9 Replenish supplies
Especially of stationery. When drawing up a battle plan, large sheets of A3 are essential pieces of kit, both for making a revision timetable and for making at-a-glance charts showing, say, the Good Things and Bad Things about the Industrial Revolution. Highlighter pens are invaluable for marking out key facts, and different coloured felt tips help the brain cells with the memorising process (for example, red for acids, blue for alkalis).
10 Gather intelligence
There’s a lot of revision-related data out there and if you are on the internet you can accumulate it without leaving your headquarters. As always, though, it helps to get choice morsels from trusted agents (such as teachers and other parents), rather than just scraping up stray bits off the information superhighway.
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