A four-week revision plan that survives contact with real life

Every student has made a revision timetable with coloured blocks for each hour of each day. Almost nobody has followed one past the first Wednesday.

They fail for a predictable reason: they are planned for a version of you who has no school, no family, no illness and no bad days. The first time real life interrupts, you fall behind, the whole grid becomes wrong, and the natural response is to abandon it rather than redraw it.

A plan that works has to expect interruption. Here is one.

Work in topics, not hours

"Study Physics 6–8pm" can be satisfied by sitting in front of a book for two hours having absorbed nothing. "Finish chapter 4 questions and list what I got wrong" cannot.

Write your plan as a list of finishable pieces of work. Each one should be small enough to complete in a sitting — a chapter's questions, one past paper section, one set of mistakes reviewed.

Week one: find out where you actually are

Do not revise in week one. Test.

Sit a short test on every chapter you will be examined on, even the ones you have not looked at yet, and especially the ones you think you are fine with. You are not trying to do well. You are producing a map.

At the end of the week you will have a list of chapters sorted into three piles:

• Solid. You scored well and it felt easy.
• Shaky. You half-remembered it, or got the method right and the arithmetic wrong.
• Gone. You could not start.

Most students discover that one or two chapters they were quietly dreading are fine, and one they assumed was fine is not. That discovery is worth the week.

Weeks two and three: spend your time where the marks are

Give the "gone" pile roughly half your time, the "shaky" pile most of the rest, and the "solid" pile almost none — just enough to keep it warm.

This feels wrong. Revising your strong subject is pleasant and revising the chapter you do not understand is miserable, so the pull is always towards the wrong one. Notice the pull and go the other way.

For each chapter in the weak pile, the cycle is the same: learn it, test yourself on it, write down what went wrong, come back to it two days later.

Week four: whole papers, at the right time of day

In the last week, switch from chapters to complete papers, under time, without the book.

Sit them at the same time of day as the real exam if you can. It sounds like a superstition and it is not: your alertness follows a daily rhythm, and if every practice paper you have ever sat was at 10pm, the morning version will feel unfamiliar in a way you did not plan for.

Mark them honestly. Mark them harshly, in fact — an examiner will not give you the benefit of the doubt, so do not give it to yourself.

The rule that makes it survive

When you miss a day, you do not repay it.

Cross the missed work off, look at what is left, and re-sort the remaining list by importance. The plan is a queue in priority order, not a contract.

The students who fall apart in the last fortnight are almost never the ones who missed a day. They are the ones who missed a day, tried to do double the next day, missed that too, and decided the plan was ruined.

Two things worth more than any timetable

Sleep. Revising until 2am and sitting a paper on five hours of sleep is not commitment, it is sabotage. Memory consolidation happens during sleep; a late night spent revising can cost you more than it adds.

Doing rather than reading. Every hour of this plan that is spent producing answers is worth several hours spent reading them. If you only take one thing from this, take that.