Posted on

How do I Know My Revision is Working?

Imagine this: you’re working hard, revising for your exam. Every morning you wake up early and spend all day in the library, reading your textbooks and going over lectures. You copy out pages and pages of notes and highlight all the key concepts. But finally, when you get to the exam, you can’t remember a thing.

Unfortunately, this scenario happens all too often. The problem is that many revision strategies that seem useful at the time don’t actually help us remember information long term.

One easy way to improve is to make our revision more active. Using active revision techniques is the best way to ensure we’re spending our study time in a way that will actually improve our exam results.

Even if you are using active techniques, though, it’s still good to check how your learning is progressing. Here are three ways to ensure your revision is effective, as well as a few potential pitfalls to avoid.

Past Papers

The obvious way to test yourself is by using past papers or practice questions. Sometimes these will be provided by your tutor, or you might be able to find them online.

One great way to use past papers is to give yourself a mini exam. Set a timer for the length your exam will be, then work through the past paper, just like you would in a real exam. Answer all the questions as thoroughly and accurately as possible, without referring to your notes.

Afterwards, go through and “grade” your exam. Think about the parts that you knew really well, and write down the areas where you struggled. Go back to your notes and fill in any gaps, and spend more time revising the difficult areas.

Potential Pitfall: Make sure you use other revision techniques, not just past papers. If you don’t supplement past papers with other techniques, you’ll end up learning all about last year’s exam, but you won’t know how to answer this year’s questions!

Brain Dump

This strategy helps you see what information you’ve fully retained. Choose a topic, pull out a blank sheet of paper, and write down everything you can remember. Then, compare with your notes to see what information you forgot to include. Everything on your brain dump paper is stuff you know, and everything that’s missing could probably do with some more revision.

Potential Pitfall: After doing a brain dump, it’s essential to go back and revise the information you missed. It can be tempting to look back at your notes and think, “oh, I actually know that,” but if you didn’t include it in the brain dump, chances are it could do with a little reinforcement.

Quiz Your Friends

Working with others is a great way to test your own revision and ensure you don’t miss anything. Creating a quiz for your friends is a helpful active learning strategy, and seeing how they do on your quiz will give you a sense of if you’re asking the right questions. Similarly, having a friend create a quiz for you will help you test your knowledge. You can also discuss the answers with your friends and work through the content together.

If you don’t have any friends on your course, you can still use this strategy. Simply give your notes to a friend or family member and ask them to pick out bits of information and ask you questions. They don’t need to be a subject expert; in fact, it might actually be helpful for you to provide simple answers that a layperson can understand.

Potential Pitfall: Whenever you’re working with coursemates, watch out for imposter syndrome. Revision can be stressful, and it’s all too easy to compare ourselves with others and feel like we’re falling behind. While our peers can give us a good benchmark for our revision, it’s important to remember that just because someone else sounds like they know everything, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re not as good.

Conclusion

As exams approach, it’s important to test ourselves to see if our revision is working. By using past papers, trying the brain dump strategy, and quizzing our friends, we can get a much more accurate idea of what we know and what we still need to learn.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.