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How do I make my revision more active?

When we think about revision, what strategies come to mind? Often, we think of strategies like highlighting textbooks, watching lectures, or rewriting our notes. These techniques are all good ways to start, but they’re fundamentally passive; they don’t require much thought. To do really well at our exams, it’s essential to spend the majority of our time on more active techniques.

Passive Revision

Passive revision is when we engage with the material on a surface level, without thinking deeply about it. Even though passive revision techniques aren’t very useful, they can be tempting because they’re easier than active techniques. They also make us feel productive, even when we aren’t actually learning anything.

Common passive techniques include:

  • Reading notes/textbooks
  • Copying notes/textbooks
  • Collating notes from different sources
  • Highlighting
  • Rewatching lectures

Active Revision

Active revision, on the other hand, makes us think. When we revise actively, we consider information in new ways and make connections between concepts. We also practice retrieving that information from our brains, ensuring we don’t just recognise information but we also recall it.

Active revision is much more work than passive revision, but it’s far more effective. Just a few hours spent on active revision can be as valuable as a full day of passive revision. This is great news because it means, if we revise actively, we can actually spend less time working and have more time left for fun!

Active Techniques

  • Create diagrams/mindmaps. Taking information and representing it in a new format helps us think things through and understand it more deeply. This strategy is particularly effective for visual learners.
  • Connect course concepts. Don’t always revise just one lecture at a time. Instead, ask yourself how the lectures connect to each other. How does what we learned in Week 1, for instance, impact on Week 10’s lectures?
  • Brain dump. Choose a topic/lecture, then take a blank piece of paper and write down everything you can remember. Afterwards, compare with your notes and check what you’ve forgotten.
  • Flashcards. Whether you make your own deck or use someone else’s, flashcards can be a great way to test yourself on key concepts. Just make sure you really are testing yourself, not flipping over the card before you’ve had time to answer.
  • Practice questions. If your module has practice questions or past papers, these are great ways to test your learning. If not, why not write some of your own questions?
  • Group study. Working with others can be a great way to learn. Try teaching a key concept to your peers, or quizzing each other on tough facts. Just remember to focus on your own progress, though, and not get caught up in comparing yourself with others.

Conclusion

Next time you’re revising, try switching out some passive techniques and replacing them with active ones. It may take more brainpower at first, but using active learning strategies will help you revise much more effectively in much less time.

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Revising for Essay Exams

Across the university, many exams are now at least partially in essay format. Rather than being asked for a basic fact, such as “What year was the battle of Waterloo?” you’re likely to face a more complicated analytical question, such as “What factors contributed to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo?” These exam questions can sound very similar to the essays we write during term, but with one key difference: we have far less time to write them.

In an essay exam, we don’t have time to go down rabbit trails or to go off-topic. Instead, it’s essential to focus our revision on the key aspects of the module. In this blog post, we’ll cover three things markers look for in essay exams: understanding, specificity, and critical analysis.

Understanding vs. Knowledge

The most important element of essay-based exams is that they focus on understanding, rather than knowledge. It isn’t enough to simply memorise a few key facts. Instead, we need to demonstrate we understand the meaning and significance of all the knowledge we’ve learned.

Two revision techniques that can help improve your understanding:

  1. Teach a friend about the topic. This can be a coursemate or someone who knows nothing about your subject. Teaching someone else (especially someone who isn’t an expert) will force you to put the ideas into simple language and help you identify what you know and what you still need to revise.
  2. Summarise the big ideas. Take a chunk of the course (perhaps a lecture, or a key reading) and spend a few minutes writing out a summary. What are the main points? How do these points fit together? Why do these ideas matter?

Specific vs. General

Even though the focus in essay exams is on knowledge rather than understanding, it’s still important to back up our understanding with specific points. For example, you could say “In 2008, the Bank of England lowered interest rates” but it would be better if you could provide the specific interest rate: 0.5%. To make your answer even stronger, you could put this number in context by describing how the rates dropped from 5.75% to 0.5%, which was the lowest the rates had ever been in the 300 years since the Bank of England began! (Source: House of Commons Library)

As you revise, look out for key bits of information, particularly ones that could be useful in a variety of essay questions. These might include:

  • Facts and figures (dates, statistics, numbers)
  • Quotes from primary sources (literature or historical documents)
  • Evidence from secondary sources (books or journal articles)

When you include these facts, it’s important to show you understand them. You can do this by:

  • Providing contextual information (how does this fact relate to others?)
  • Explaining their significance (why is this information relevant?)

Essentially, good revision will involve some memorisation of facts, but you should always make sure to keep these facts in context and remember their significance.

Analysis vs. Description

One of the main things your markers look for in essay exams is critical analysis. They don’t simply want you to copy information from lectures; no, they want you to use that information to say something interesting.

A few revision strategies to help you improve your analysis:

  1. Compare and contrast topics across the module. Many exam questions will ask you to relate different parts of the course to each other, so it’s good to practice during revision. Choose two parts of the module and identify the similarities and differences, or pick one key theme and see how it applies in different segments of the module.
  2. Read and critique an article. Find an article (your module reading list a good place to start) and work out its main ideas. Do you agree or disagree? What evidence does the author use to back up their points? How does the article fit with (or contradict) what you learned in the module?
  3. What’s your opinion? Choose an area of the module you’re particularly passionate about, or maybe one where you disagree with your peers or the tutor. What’s your opinion of the topic? How does your opinion differ from other people’s opinions? Identify the reasons (and the evidence!) why you think the way you do.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve discussed three things markers look for in an essay exam and identified revision strategies that will help you improve in these areas. Essay exams can be challenging, but if you focus on understanding, using specific information, and critical analysis, you’ll be most of the way there to a brilliant exam answer!

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Revising for Multiple Choice Exams

During your time at university, it’s likely you’ll encounter at least one multiple choice test. Whether this is a formative quiz during the semester or a 100% exam at the end of the year, multiple choice tests have their own benefits and challenges. For the most part, the same revision techniques will work for both multiple choice exams and essay exams, but in this post we’ll explore a few techniques that will be particularly helpful for MCQs.

Top Tips

  • Focus on understanding, not memorisation. This holds true for any kind of exam, but it’s important to state here because we often assume that multiple choice exams are more focussed on memorisation. If we just store a few key terms in our minds, surely we’ll recognise them on the exam, right? The difficulty is that the exam might use different vocabulary to what we expect, or it might ask us to apply our knowledge. In this case, it’s better to understand the concept, rather than just know a few key terms.
  • Use question banks, but not exclusively. If your course provides question banks or past papers, use those to get a sense of the types of questions that will be asked. You can also use them to test your knowledge, but make sure you supplement this with other methods. Otherwise, you’ll know the material from the questions, but you’ll have significant gaps elsewhere.
  • Create your own questions. This method can be time-consuming, but it works well for focussed study on particularly challenging areas. Spend some time coming up with your own questions and writing answers– including wrong ones! Creating answers that are wrong but plausible will deepen your understanding of the subject.

Single Best Answer

In certain disciplines, such as medicine and dentistry, you’ll come across a particular type of MCQ called “Single Best Answer.” This kind of question is particularly challenging because all the answers are potentially correct, and you need to choose the one that’s best. Here are a few revision techniques that are especially helpful for these questions (though they’ll be valuable for any MCQ exam).

  • Study the wrong answers in question banks. It can be tempting to just answer a question, get it right, and move on. To get the best use out of your question bank, however, you should also explore the “wrong” answers. Since all the answers in a SBA question are technically correct, you can learn a lot by working through each one and asking yourself, “why isn’t this one best?”
  • Focus your revision on recall, not recognition. Recognition is where you recognise something when you see it written down, while recall is where you can pull information out of your head. Recall is essential in SBA questions because every answer will have key words we recognise. We need to be able to pull the correct information from our brains, rather than just choosing the answer that seems familiar. In your revision, then, you should focus on actively testing yourself, rather than just reading or re-writing notes.
  • Explore connections between topics. Particularly in upper years, SBA questions will often ask you to pull together information from various parts of your course. In your revision, then, it’s helpful to create diagrams or mindmaps that show how different topics link together (bonus points if you make this activity recall-focussed by creating the mindmap from memory, then using your notes to fill in the gaps).

Conclusion

This blog post has covered some revision techniques that will be particularly effective for MCQ exams. If you’d like to learn more, you can check out our ASC Guide to Multiple Choice Tests.

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Making a Revision Plan

It’s the beginning of exam season. You’ve got several weeks of revision, then a few more weeks of exams. In just a little while, you’ll be done! But until then, you’ve got so much to do, and weeks of unstructured time stretching ahead of you.

How can we make the best use of this time? A revision plan will help you get everything done, while still having time for rest or time with friends.

Why Plan?

Before we discuss how to plan, we should briefly address why planning is important. After all, planning does take time, and it’s important not to get so caught up in planning your revision that you forget to actually revise!

Here are three reasons why making a revision plan is helpful:

  1. A plan helps us avoid procrastination, which leads to cramming. Research shows that cramming may seem like an effective strategy, as it makes us feel very familiar with the material, but actually it doesn’t help us learn.
  2. A plan helps us make time for fun! Exam weeks will always be busy, but if we plan our revision well, we’ll have time left over to see people we love and do the things we care about.
  3. Planning reduces stress. Studies have shown that adopting planning techniques, like the ones in this post, can significantly reduce our stress and increase our happiness.

Top Tips

Now we’ve covered why planning is important, it’s time to offer our top tips for effective revision plans.

1. Space Things Out

We’ve already heard that cramming is an ineffective revision technique. Instead, we should try Spaced Practice. In this technique, we stretch our revision out over days, weeks, or even months, rather than doing it all at once. This helps us take advantage of the “spacing effect,” which is where revising material in short chunks over a period of time results in better long-term learning than cramming.

A key part of Spaced Practice is giving yourself time to return to material over and over. This is important because, when we learn something new, we’re likely to forget most of it very quickly. The more often we go back to the material, however, the better it sticks in our brains and the longer we’re able to remember it. This phenomenon is called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.

When we make our plans, then, we should try to spread our revision out over as long a period as possible. For example, if you budget 20 hours to revise for an upcoming exam, it’s far better to do an hour a day for 20 days, rather than 10 hours a day for 2 days! Whenever you can, take advantage of Spaced Practice and avoid cramming.

2. Break It Down

When we make our plans, it’s important to be specific. Don’t just put, “revise economics” in your calendar for the day. Instead, choose a reasonable length of time (30 minutes to an hour tends to be good) and give yourself a concrete topic to study. Focussing on a small chunk of information will help you retain it better, rather than getting overwhelmed by too much information.

It also helps to be task-oriented in your revision. Instead of just putting, “fluid dynamics” in your plan, think about what you want to do to help you revise. Will you go over your lecture notes? Will you answer questions? Will you create a mindmap? The more active, the better!

Here are a few activities you could do in a 30-60 minute slot:

  • Identify key learning points from one lecture
  • Create a mindmap or diagram of a specific concept
  • Try a past paper or practice question
  • Work through a deck of flash cards
  • Make connections between two lectures/concepts

3. Be Realistic

Finally, we need to ensure our revision plans are realistic. How often have you made a To-Do list, only to find that, at the end of the day, you’d only finished half the tasks? Not finishing what we planned can be incredibly demotivating, and it can mean we’re constantly having to modify our plan to catch up on all the things we didn’t manage to do. In order to plan well, it’s essential to be realistic when managing our workload.

The difficulty is that our brains tend to fall for the Planning Fallacy, where we overestimate how much we’re able to get done, and underestimate how much time a task will take. If we’re aware of this fallacy, though, we can fight against it.

Here are a few ways to create more realistic to-do lists:

  • Make your to-do list half as long as you think. If you get everything done, you can always do more, but it’s better to be too short than too long.
  • Think back and remember how long something took you last time (be honest!)
  • Time yourself completing an activity, then use that time as a guide for your plan.
  • Keep track of what you do every day, for a week. Use this as a rough guide for how much you can realistically accomplish in a week.

Conclusion

In this blog, we’ve discussed why planning is important and identified three strategies for effective revision planning. If you use spaced practice, break down your revision into chunks, and identifying realistic goals, your revision should be much more effective and less stressful!