With exam season just beginning, you may feel overwhelmed, stressed or nervous about your approaching exams and what seems like copious amounts of revision to do. Hopefully these useful tips should help you to feel more prepared to revise for your A Levels and help you to achieve the best possible results that you are able to.
- Be Organised
Don’t leave all it until the night before your exam to start learning two years’ worth of content. Being organised well ahead of your exams will help you enormously. If you take notes as you go along, and organise your work well, then it will make things much easier when the time comes to start revising and you will feel far more prepared. You can then dedicate your time to revising and going over the content you have learnt, rather than spending hours just before your exam making revision notes and filing all your papers. Some of the most helpful websites you can use for your revision are BBC Bitesize and Get Revising.
- Create a Revision Timetable
It may feel overwhelming having multiple subjects and exams to revise for. Making a revision timetable is a great idea as it will help you to plan out what subject you are going to revise and when. This means that you can dedicate particular times to certain subjects, and perhaps spend longer on areas that you feel less confident on, rather than leaving that to the last minute. This will also help you to feel much less overwhelmed, as when you have your work split into time chunks it seems much more achievable.
- Complete Past Papers
Completing past papers for your chosen subject under the same exam board is a helpful method to prepare you for the real thing. It indicates which sort of questions and question style tend to come up on the exam and helps you to become more familiar with completing an exam. It’s also a great idea to complete past papers under timed, exam conditions, so that you gain practice for the real thing, and you can see how you perform under exam conditions. You can then mark the paper yourself once you have completed it, using the answer booklet, so you can see how you did and how you can improve for next time. The answer booklet will give informative sample answers which can help you learn how to answer the questions you are given.
- Be Healthy
One of the most important ways to prepare for your exam period is to live a healthy lifestyle. Doing copious amounts of revision and reading will not help you if you aren’t getting any sleep or if you aren’t eating properly. It’s important to take breaks during revision in order to concentrate better and to help you feel more refreshed and prepared when you begin your revision session. Ensure that you are getting plenty of fresh air during the exam period, even if it is just going for a short walk outdoors in between revising, as this will really help to reset your mind once you go back to your desk. Make sure you’re prioritise getting around 8 hours of sleep every night, and not staying up until sunrise cramming all of your revision in, as this will mean you aren’t able to study effectively the next day and you won’t be able to use your time wisely. Another important factor to consider is what you are eating during the exam period. Fuelling your body is vital for fuelling your brain and helping you to revise better. Try to maintain a balanced, nutritious diet throughout the exam period and drink plenty of water everyday in order to stay healthy.
