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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
