Split by need, not by fairness
The instinct is to divide the time equally. That's the wrong basis: the correct split depends on how far each subject is from a pass, how heavy the paper is, and how much of each is recall versus problem-solving.
- 1
Sit a diagnostic on both, this evening
Thirty minutes each, cold, from a past paper. Painful and non-negotiable — you cannot allocate a week without knowing the actual gap, and the gap is rarely where the anxiety says it is.
- 2
Score each subject out of the marks you'd currently get
Two rough numbers. The subject further from where you need to be gets more time, regardless of which exam comes first.
- 3
Weight for credit and consequence
A 100% final in a core module outranks a 30% paper in an elective. If one is a resit or a pass/fail hurdle, that changes the allocation more than anything else.
- 4
Weight for how the subject decays
Problem-solving skill degrades slowly; volume recall degrades fast. Put the recall-heavy subject nearer its exam and the problem-based one earlier.
- 5
Write the split as hours per subject and commit
"About 60/40" becomes 100/0 by Wednesday. Numbers on a page survive the pull of whichever exam is closer.
Alternate days, not hours
Switching subjects every couple of hours sounds like sensible interleaving and isn't. Two exams in a week need deep sessions, and each switch costs the twenty minutes it takes to reload a subject's context.
| Pattern | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Whole days per subject | Best for most pairs. Deep enough to make progress, frequent enough to keep both alive. |
| Half-days, morning and afternoon | Workable when both are recall-heavy and neither needs long problem sessions. |
| Alternating every 90 minutes | Reload cost dominates. Avoid during a two-exam week. |
| One subject fully, then the other | The classic failure — subject one is cold by exam day and subject two got three days. |
Whichever pattern you pick, every day must touch both subjects at least once, even if the second touch is twenty minutes of retrieval. That short daily contact is what stops the other exam becoming a source of dread — and dread costs more hours than the twenty minutes does.
Sequence the last three days around the exam order
The endgame matters more than the opening. Two rules cover most timetables.
- The day before each exam belongs to that exam. No exceptions, no heroic cross-subject sessions.
- The gap between the two exams is short and it's all subject two. Plan for it being useful only for light retrieval, not for learning anything new — after an exam you have less capacity than you expect.
- Front-load the first exam's heavy work, so its final days are consolidation rather than acquisition.
- Keep a short daily retrieval slot for subject two through the whole first-exam period, so it isn't cold when you arrive at it.
- If they're on the same day, treat them as one very long paper: the second exam's revision must be finished before the morning, because there's no usable gap.
Cut both syllabuses, deliberately
In a normal revision period you might cover everything. Across two exams in a week you won't, and the choice is between cutting deliberately and cutting by running out of time — which cuts whatever happened to be last in the folder.
For each subject, rank topics by past-paper frequency and mark weight, then draw a line. Below the line is the material you accept you'll handle badly if it comes up. Deciding that in advance is far better than discovering it at 11pm the night before — the same triage as how to revise in one week, doubled.
Keep the two subjects separate in your head
- Physically separate materials. Different tabs, different piles, different desk sides. Interference between similar subjects is real, and it's worst when they're mixed in the same workspace.
- Different locations if you can. Library for one, desk for the other. Context helps keep them distinct.
- A hard boundary at the switch. Ten minutes and a walk, not straight from one to the other. This is where the reload cost lives.
- Never revise them in the same session. Especially if they're related subjects, where confusing two similar frameworks under exam pressure is a genuine and common way to lose marks.
Protect sleep even more than usual
Two exams in a week means two consecutive performance days on the same sleep budget, and the second one is where sleep debt shows. The night between them is the highest-value sleep of the whole period and the one most likely to be sacrificed to cramming.
Realistically, an hour of light retrieval that evening plus a normal night beats four hours of new material and five hours' sleep — the second exam is scored on retrieval under pressure, which is exactly what sleep loss degrades. Sleep and memory covers the mechanism; all-nighters covers what it costs when you get it wrong.