When should Year 11 & 13 students start their exam revision?

In June last year I posted a blog about how next year’s Year 11 students can learn from the mistakes of this year’s Year 11 students (What Can Current Year 10 Students Learn from Year 11 About Exams?). In this article I discussed how most students wished they’d started their revision much earlier. Even though I’d warned them that this mistake was also made by the year-group before them, and the year-group before that, too.

Well, that Year 10 group are now in Year 11 and I can already see history repeating itself again. So what can they do about it?

Start revising NOW!

That’s what they can do. Start Now.

By the October mid term break, Year 11 students are a quarter of their way through the school year (exams start very soon after the Easter break). By Christmas, they are half way there. Time has a nasty habit of creeping up on us doesn’t it?

So what exactly can students do? How do you revise effectively?

I’ve created a Revision Toolkit that you can access right here on this website. This is a collection of effective revision techniques which work. The collection is organised into sections such as:

Planning your revision activities
Using past exam papers
Working with friends
Using flashcards
Using the exam board specifications
Activities that DO NOT work
Using the internet

Each section contains a number of different activities that students can try. Obviously, students aren’t going to use them all. The idea is that different people prefer to revise in different ways. All I’m doing is offering a number of different things to try. Hopefully everyone should be able to find a small number of activities that work for them.

I have written a number of other blog posts on the subject of exam revision which can be read as a single collection here.

There is a nice blog by Miss_Understanding_Education which contains some additional revision techniques and study habits that students could try for themselves.

Little but often is the key. But start NOW!

Your future is decided by what you do right now!

Is that clear? Is there anybody that doesn’t understand what I mean by that? I don’t mean tomorrow, I mean now. Stop reading this and start your revision right now.