How to revise for mocks, and what to do with your results

Do mocks actually matter?

Mocks do not count towards your final GCSE or A-level grade. They matter for two other reasons.

The first is that teachers use them. For sixth-form students applying to university, UCAS tells schools that predicted grades should be "based on demonstrable evidence of performance", such as past performance, internal assessments or current student work, and determined by teachers' professional judgement. A mock is one of the clearest pieces of internal evidence a teacher has, so it is worth taking seriously. Schools differ in how much weight they give it, so ask your teachers how they use mock results.

The second reason matters more. A mock is a full rehearsal under real conditions, on the whole course or a large part of it, months before it counts. It tells you, more honestly than any amount of rereading, what you know and what you only think you know. A disappointing mock that shows you twenty gaps is more useful than a good one that shows you none.

What should you do in the weeks before your mocks?

1. Find out what is on each paper. Ask each teacher which topics, units or chapters the mock covers, and which paper format it uses. Mocks often cover only part of the course, and revising the whole specification when half of it is not examined wastes weeks.
2. Make a topic list per subject. Write every topic in scope down the side of a page. Next to each one, rate yourself red, amber or green, but base the rating on a quick test (a few questions from memory), not on how familiar the topic feels.
3. Spread the topics out. Put each topic into your week more than once, with gaps of a few days between visits, and mix subjects within a day. Our guide to making a revision timetable walks through building the plan itself, including for mocks, so it is not repeated here.
4. Start reds first, but keep touching greens. Most time goes to red and amber topics. Greens get a short test every week or so, because a topic you knew in September can fade by the time the mock comes round.

How should you revise each topic?

The single biggest change most students can make is to replace rereading with testing. In a large review of ten common study techniques, Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated practice testing and distributed practice (spreading study over time) as high utility, and rated rereading, highlighting and summarising as low utility. Their advice was to use practice testing instead of rereading.

The reason rereading is so popular is that it feels like it works. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who restudied a passage did better on a test five minutes later, but students who had tested themselves instead remembered substantially more on tests two days and a week later. The restudying group were also more confident they would remember it. That gap between feeling and reality is exactly what a mock exposes.

A meta-analysis by Adesope, Trevisan and Sundararajan (2017) pooled studies of practice testing and found that practice tests were more beneficial for learning than restudying and every other comparison condition they looked at. So for each topic, a session might look like this:

• Test first. Answer a handful of questions on the topic from memory, or write down everything you can recall before opening your notes. Our guide to active recall techniques has several ways to do this.
• Check, then relearn only what you missed. Open your notes for the gaps, not the whole chapter.
• Do exam-style questions. Mocks test whether you can use the knowledge in the format the paper asks for. Once a topic is mostly green, move on to past paper questions. How to use past papers covers doing and marking them properly.
• Come back to it. Test the same topic again a few days later, before you feel ready.

What about the week of the mocks?

By the week itself, the aim is to keep topics warm and arrive rested, not to learn new material.

• Revise the next paper the evening before. Short self-tests on that subject's reds and ambers, then stop. Our guide to studying during exam week covers how to split your time between papers.
• Practise the conditions. Mocks are a chance to try your exam-day routine: timing per question, what you do when you go blank, where you start on the paper. Note what goes wrong, because that is useful too.
• Protect sleep. A run of late nights before a week of papers makes every paper after the first one worse.

What should you do with your mock results?

This is where most of the value is, and it is the step most students skip. The usual reaction to a mock result is to look at the grade, feel good or bad about it, and then go back to rereading notes. Instead, treat the results as a diagnosis.

1. Get every paper back. Ask for the marked script, not just the grade, and the mark scheme if your teacher can share it.
2. Sort every lost mark into a cause. Go through question by question and label each lost mark: didn't know it, half knew it, ran out of time, or misread or misunderstood the question. Each needs a different fix.
3. Build a gap list across all your subjects. Write the topic, the subject, the cause and roughly how many marks it cost. Patterns show up quickly: the same topic losing marks on two papers, or the same timing problem in every subject.
4. Prioritise by marks, not by mood. Fix the gaps that cost the most marks, and the ones that come up often on real papers, before the ones that annoy you most.
5. Match the fix to the cause. Knowledge gaps go back into your self-testing rotation. Timing problems need timed practice. Misreading problems need practice with exam-style wording and mark schemes. Rereading the chapter fixes none of these on its own.
6. Retest within a couple of weeks. For each gap, test yourself on that topic again soon, then again later. A gap is only closed when you can answer questions on it from memory after a break.
7. Talk to your teacher. Ask what they think the biggest gap is. They have seen your script next to everyone else's.

Keep the gap list. It becomes the backbone of your revision plan for the real exams, and each time you close a gap you can cross it off.

If your mock covers specific chapters, Ace can help with the testing part. Upload your own class notes, slides or textbook chapters as a PDF, PowerPoint or Word file, pick the chapters the mock covers, and Ace turns them into practice questions written from that material only, with the sentence from your file that backs each answer. After the mocks, you can pick just the chapters on your gap list. The how it works page shows the steps.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. UCAS. Predicted grades: what you need to know. UCAS advisers guidance.
2. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
3. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
4. Adesope, O. O., Trevisan, D. A., & Sundararajan, N. (2017). Rethinking the use of tests: A meta-analysis of practice testing. Review of Educational Research, 87(3), 659–701.