Hi all, I'm 16 years old and currently in Year 12. My mum is a lurking MN member, and has told me about the angsty threads that tend to crop up as exam season approaches. I did my GCSEs last year, and am proud of my results so I want to share my tips with the MNers, and hopefully they may come in handy!
Active revision is essential. Sitting and reading a textbook will do absolutely no good, we can’t retain anything that way, and frankly, it’s boring! Encourage your teens to do active revision in a way that suits them. Some, like me, prefer to take notes and this can be done in a plethora of different ways: linear note taking, making mindmaps, writing flashcards. A friend of mine made a PowerPoint presentation for each subject with one slide per point on the specification – it’s a fantastic way to cover everything you need to learn but stay concise, and watching the presentation is a good way to consolidate.
Make it pretty/fun! This will probably appeal more to girls than boys, but I personally treated myself to some fineliners and made coloured revision notes. Not essential, of course, but for visual learner like myself, it can make the note taking more engaging. Also, colour coding for languages is fantastic, blue for masculine works, pink for feminine and so on. Apologies for the gender stereotyping there, but it did work for me!
Planning is crucial. Although I understand that so many people find it difficult to make and stick to a timetable, I think I’ve found an easy way to do it! Here’s my how-to on how to make a revision timetable and stick to it.
- Get a piece of A4 paper for each subject and write a numbered list of topics that need studying for that subject. You could do this on the computer.
- Decide time slots in which you will revise every day. I personally, work best in 1 hour slots. So on study leave I knew I’d be revising for example, from 10-11am, 2-3pm, 4-5pm and 6-7pm.
- Make a table for each week of revising. The days in a column down the left-hand side and your ‘revision slots’ across the top.
- Work systematically through the topic lists you made and fill in your revision slots.
- Don’t just write ‘Biology’, be specific. Write ‘Biology Topic 1’ or ‘French Topics 3 and 4’. You know how long it will take you to revise each topic.
- I found it helpful to alternate between my ‘nightmare’ and my ‘favourite’ subjects, and do tricky topics in the mornings when I was more alert.
- Leave 2 hours per week as ‘catch-up time’. Nobody’s perfect, everyone falls behind. If you have these two free hours to fall back on in case you accidentally overslept, it’s much less stressful. Also it’s an incentive to stick to your timetable – if you don’t miss sessions, you can have Sunday off!
Past papers and practice questions are your best friend. Honestly, they are a lifesaver! Looking at markscheme after markscheme gave me a brilliant insight into what the examiners wanted from me, so when it came to the real exam, I could begin to imagine in my head exactly what the markscheme would say.
I hope this is helpful! I’m more than happy to give more tips, ad if you have questions, ask away!
The GCSEs I did were: maths, English language, English literature, biology, chemistry, physics, French, German, history and ICT