Revision Tips

Disclaimer: 

By no means am I an expert in ways to revise - in fact, no one is an expert in ways to revise because all of our brains work differently! But what I can do is give you some revision strategies that I found have worked well for me over the last 8 years of sitting exams. Keep reading to see my top tips:

General Advice

My first piece of advice which I could argue is the most universal piece of advice I can give, is to take regular breaks, and get lots of sleep! We are all only human which means our brains get tired after intense use, and revising for University exams definitely falls into the bracket of intense use - it is not designed to be easy. So every hour, or couple of hours, take a 5-10 minute break. You will need to do longer periods of study leading up to you exams to allow your brain to acclimatise to completing 2/3 hour exams, but build this up over your revision period. 

Further to this, when you sleep is when your body:

a) Recovers

b) Downloads information

As you begin to revise for exams, you will be tiring your brain whilst needing it to download lots of information - long proofs, formulas, logic. So you should make sure you are giving it enough time capture as much information as possible. When exam period arrives, you may have exams on consecutive days, so could end up doing a few late night revision sessions, so it is really important that in this revision period, you allow your brain a good amount of time to soak up that day's worth of information.

Revision Strategy

When I was revising for my A-level Chemistry exam, one of my A-level teachers (she was Miss Croft before she married) told us all about 3 stage marking. This is one of the tools I used throughout my A-level exams, and all the way through my MSci Mathematics course. It is as follows:

1. Complete the exam in the allowed time (often 2 hours at KCL, could be 3) in exam conditions. Even if you know you will score really poorly or fail, this is a good exercise to show you the bits of knowledge that you have. Make sure you do this in exam conditions - great for getting yourself ready for the real exam.

2. Go and get your lecture notes, and re-do the exam as though it were an open book exam. This stage will tell you how well you could do if your understanding didn't develop, and you sat the exam being able to just repeat information. This should be a lower bound target for where you should be by exam time.

3. Get the mark scheme/answers, and go through both of your attempts, see what you missed first and second time round. This is where you really need to develop your understanding of the course and it's content.

You will see how your progress develops over the revision period, and also how quickly you are able to diagnose what you do not know, and learn it.

This strategy also works well for tutorial sheets, especially where modules are fairly new and do not have a wealth of past papers to offer.

I also loved to use revision cards for key definitions, lemmas and theorems. Once you know and understand the definitions and key theorems, you can start applying them! Next comes learning the proof, which can make so much more sense when you have a very good understanding of what the theorem is saying, and how to apply it.

Good Luck!

Please let me know if you have any advice or techniques that you find help with revision. I am keen to know, and will also update this page over time, to slowly accumulate a bank of revision advice/tools/techniques that students now and in the future can refer to for help!