GCSE Revision Tips: Masroor Khan, Tiffin School

The first tip is to start early. By getting a 1-2 month head start on everyone else, this significantly decreases the everyday workload and makes revising much more manageable without having to cram at the last minute. For example, if your exams were in May, you could revise 4 hours a day if you started in February, or get the same amount done but revise 1-2 hours a day starting from October. Just by starting slightly earlier, the pressure is a lot less.

The second tip is to make some sort of a plan for revision. Whilst it may not have to be the most perfectly detailed and fully-coloured calendar, a simple indicator as to what week you might focus on a particular subject massively helps. As most people will be revising approximately 10-11 GCSE subjects, it seems like a lot at first. However, by breaking down the revision into manageable chunks and assigning specific days to specific subjects, you’ll know exactly what to revise for your exams, GCSEs or not.

Practice papers are one of the best ways to revise for GCSEs. The same question format is just recycled every year or so, therefore by practising past exam questions, most likely the same sort of question will come up with small tweaks in the wording. Practising exam technique is also very important, such as remembering to include keywords that the examiners are looking for, or arguing on both sides with a conclusion for Geography 9 markers.

Before practice papers, possibly the two most important tips are to incorporate active recall and spaced repetition into your revision. Active recall is simply devoting time to retrieving information from memory to help remember it in the long-term. A simple example of this is using physical and digital flashcards, using websites like Quizlet or Anki, which involves using active forms of revision to test yourself, rather than using passive forms of revision such as re-reading or highlighting to revise.

Using passive forms of revision fails to build long-term memory without testing yourself on what you are reading. It also takes up much more time than active forms of revision.

Spaced repetition is another heavily overlooked study method, which is usually incorporated into many flashcard softwares such as Quizlet and Anki. This is an evidence-based learning technique where newer and more difficult flashcards are shown more often, whilst older and less difficult flashcards are shown less often. This also includes spacing our learning out over time which helps our brains learn more effectively. For example, you can go over the information after 6 days, then after 9 days, then after 19 days, and eventually you will know the information on the top of your head without needing to constantly re-read it.

By combining both spaced repetition and active recall to make flashcards or mind maps etc and then following up with the use of past-paper questions to apply this knowledge to exam-style questions, this has proven to be possibly the best way to revise with outstanding results given to students who revise in this way.
 

Taking breaks goes hand in hand with exercising and drinking water. In fact, there are hundreds of studies that prove activities such as lifting weights can dramatically improve cognitive function and performance, so can staying hydrated. Studying 8 hours a day without breaks is pointless and does more harm than good. You want both a healthy body and a healthy mind during exams, and be able to maintain a balanced lifestyle with activities you enjoy.

Instead of writing up notes off of random search results you find on the internet, textbooks do the trick. Although it comes with a price involved, textbooks that you can buy from CGP, Pearson’s, Kerboodle etc perfectly summarise all the notes you need for your GCSEs with a cost of just £4.99 for most CGP books. These books are based directly off of the specification for the exam board they specify, so the notes in the textbooks are in the long run going to be more helpful than merely revising from notes you make in lessons. Of course, it is important to take some notes during lessons, but don’t neglect textbooks as they save possibly weeks of revision.
From then onwards, you can simply turn these key notes into flashcards without having to scramble for ripped up pages of notes that you lost last year.

You also need to experiment with what learning style works for you. Some people are visual learners, whilst others are auditory learners. Some people prefer making mind maps as this helps them learn best, whilst others learn better from flashcards or from techniques such as blurting, which is a useful one. It’s often referred to as a memory dump which involves writing everything you can possibly remember after reading a page of a textbook or regarding a particular sub-topic. It will most likely be different for everyone. By finding out what works best for you, this can save valuable revision time.