The aesthetics of revision

 Full disclosure, I am a bit of a nerd. I love succeeding academically and proving that all the time and effort put into revising has paid off. It's a real shame that in this generation it feels like good grades are something to be ashamed of... nevertheless, although exam results do not control your future,  they do give you more options for what you can do.

I am so proud of my exam results; at A level I achieved A*AA which enabled me to get into my first choice of uni :) My subjects were art, maths and biology which turned out to give me a wide range of working techniques with art being fully coursework based, maths relying solely on past papers then biology being note based revision.


So, my revision techniques:

1) Maths

Past papers are your new best friend! They allow you to try questions from the whole syllabus which you can work through at your own pace. They also let you pick up on common exam questions. For example, I had a general idea of what kinds of questions come up a lot. I was fortunate in that my college (but mostly because of the best maths teacher ever) printed us a copy of every past paper question from 2005 (just the questions on one page, no answer space as you can use scrap paper) to 2017 so that we could take them to class and ask specific things and they're always available to us. Exam solutions was an actual godsend!!! One of my maths teachers wasn't the best however this website went thoroughly through every question and explained the logic behind them and honestly saved my final result from a C to a B!

Another thing I did was making summary sheets of all the simplified maths equations I needed to know (for example differencing cos and sin etc) and pinned them up on my wall so that I could quickly look up while doing a past paper and not have to search through my files every time thus saving precious time! I did the title in Sharpie  and the colour coordinated with a highlighter in order to make them aesthetically pleasing so that it didn't look as much like horrendous maths.

As time went on I could do a past paper and mark it in one of my study periods (1 hour ) and so getting myself to do a paper wasn't a strenuous idea, however, this speed only comes with practise (I basically recognised the questions by the end). It is hard getting started as remembering methods you learnt 2 years ago is really hard however it soon comes back don't panic! Just don't give up on it and you'll succeed soon!

2) Biology

The vast amount of content there is for A-level biology is really overwhelming. Nonetheless there are ways to keep up with it! My method began at the start of year 12. Every mini test I had, I made notes in an A4 notebook from WHSmith that included hand drawn diagrams and a couple of different pen colours to keep it interesting to read. The notebook has 4 coloured sections so I dedicated one section to each teacher (I had 2) for year 1 and year 2. Thus, by the end of year 2 I had a full, note form of the syllabus in my own words and written in a style I understood and diagrams that helped me understand the concepts. The important part of note making is that you understand it. I write a lot more than most people in my notes however for me I need a full explanation to understand it. Being aesthetically pleasing was also really important as I knew if they looked dull I would never read them again.
So, it rolled round to exam time and I realised I already had a full set of revision notes that I'd previously made through the year. I therefore decided to make 'notes of notes' and so condensed my fairly extensive notes into and even smaller A5 notebook from WHSmith that I made myself only write key concepts and not draw too many diagrams. So in this book I recapped the whole 2 years work so that it was fresh in my mind. Granted, this took FOREVER however I know note making is how I learn so I invested all the time into it.
Being on the new syllabus, there was only 2 years of past papers so I tried to save these till the very last moment to do and then marked them thoroughly and made notes of all the things I did wrong. I actually didn't do very well on these papers however by marking them so thoroughly I realised what the mark scheme was specifically looking for and made a mental not of that.

Good luck with any exams you have :)

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