The two mistakes that define a bad revision plan
Mistake one: you revise what you like. Left to your own judgment you will spend disproportionate time on topics you already understand, because studying them feels good and studying the others feels like drowning. Almost everyone does this, almost nobody notices, and it is the single largest waste in a revision timetable.
Mistake two: you re-read. It produces fluency, fluency feels like knowledge, and the feeling is wrong. See active recall for why this illusion is so durable.
Every part of the plan below exists to remove one of those two mistakes by taking the decision away from you.
Week 6: assemble, and find out what you don't have
Get every piece of material for the module into one place: slides, readings, recordings, problem sheets, photographs of your own notes. Then generate a study guide and read its gap list — the topics on the syllabus your material doesn't actually cover. Every year, people discover in week one of revision that they never had the week 7 slides. Discover it now, when the fix is an email.
Week 6, same day: sit a diagnostic
Before revising anything, take a full practice quiz across the whole module. Closed book. It will be a bloodbath, and that is the point — you are buying information, and it is the cheapest information you will buy all term.
What you get is a ranked list of your weaknesses that isn't filtered by your feelings about the topics. This is the single highest-value hour of the six weeks and almost nobody spends it, because sitting an exam you will definitely fail, voluntarily, six weeks early, is unpleasant.
Weeks 5–2: the loop
- 1
Every wrong answer becomes a flashcard
Your deck is now, by construction, made of your gaps. You are no longer choosing what to revise — the diagnostic chose.
- 2
Review whatever is due, daily
Twenty minutes. FSRS decides which cards, based on your memory state, not your mood. This is the mechanism that stops you drifting back to the topics you enjoy.
- 3
One topic a day, properly
Take a weak topic. Blank-page recall first — write everything you know, from memory, before opening anything. Then read to fill the holes you found. Then card the holes.
- 4
Re-quiz weekly
Same diagnostic, again. Watch the weak-area chart move. This is also what tells you a topic has been fixed and can be dropped — a decision people otherwise never make, so they keep revising it forever.
Week 1: past papers, under conditions
Timed, closed book, no phone, in one sitting. The point is not the content — by now you know the content — it is the format, the pacing, and finding out that you spend eleven minutes too long on question two. Sit the real past papers; when they run out, generate more in the same style. Everything you get wrong goes straight back into the deck.
The last 24 hours
Learn nothing new. The marginal fact is worth almost nothing, and the anxiety of trying to acquire it costs you real marks in the first twenty minutes of the paper — a much worse trade than it feels like at the time.
Review the due cards. Look at your study guide's structure once — not its content, its *shape*, so you have a map. Then sleep, because the all-nighter is a false economy and consolidation happens while you're unconscious.