Ace
Short answer: in exam week, spend your time answering questions, not re-reading. Plan each day around the next exam while keeping short sessions on later ones, mix topics within a session, protect your sleep (studies link cutting sleep to study more with worse academic days afterwards), and finish each evening with a quick recall round instead of a late cram.
Why is exam week different from normal revision?
Time is fixed and every subject is competing for it. The temptation is to read everything once more, stay up late and hope. That feels busy but wastes the week, because re-reading is one of the least effective ways to prepare, and sleep loss makes the next day worse.
What are the rules for studying in exam week?
1. Practise retrieval, not re-reading
Answering questions from memory is one of the two most effective study techniques in a major review of learning research (Dunlosky et al., 2013). In exam week, every session should be mostly questions: past papers, end-of-chapter problems or questions built from your notes. See active recall vs re-reading.
2. Keep later exams warm
Don't drop a subject completely until the day before its exam. A short daily session keeps it from fading, because spaced practice beats massed practice (Cepeda et al., 2006). Our spaced repetition schedule explains the timing.
3. Mix it up
Within a subject, shuffle question types and chapters. Practising mixed problems feels harder but leads to better test performance than practising one type at a time (Rohrer and Taylor, 2007), because the exam won't tell you which method to use.
4. Sleep is part of the plan
A study that followed hundreds of high-school students day by day found that on days they gave up sleep to study more than usual, they were more likely to have academic problems the next day, such as not understanding lessons or doing badly on a test (Gillen-O'Neel, Huynh and Fuligni, 2013). Late nights in exam week borrow from tomorrow's exam.
What should I study each day of exam week?
Say you have exams on Wednesday, Thursday and the following Monday:
- Saturday and Sunday: a timed past paper for each subject. Mark them and list the topics where you lost marks. That list is your week.
- Monday: most of the day on Wednesday's weak topics, as questions. One short session each for Thursday and Monday's subjects.
- Tuesday: mixed questions across all of Wednesday's subject, then a final recall round in the evening. One short session for each of the other two subjects.
- Wednesday (exam 1): after the exam, rest for an hour, then switch to Thursday's subject with questions only.
- Thursday (exam 2): after the exam, take the evening off.
- Friday to Sunday: Monday's subject, with weak topics first, a full past paper on Saturday and a light recall round on Sunday.
The fastest way to have enough questions for all this is to make them from your own lecture material. Ace turns your slides, PDFs and YouTube lectures into practice questions: multiple choice, putting steps in order, typing the answer, labelling diagrams from your notes, and simulations for formula topics. You can choose just the chapters you're weak on, and each answer shows the line from your notes that backs it.
What should I do on the day of an exam?
- Morning: a light recall round on key definitions and formulas, not new material.
- Before you go in: if you're anxious, take ten minutes to write down your worries. In a classroom study, students who wrote about their test worries just before an exam did better than those who didn't (Ramirez and Beilock, 2011).
- In the exam: read every question first, start with ones you can do, and leave time to check. For multiple-choice papers, see how to study for multiple-choice exams.
- After: don't go over the paper with friends. Switch to the next subject or rest.
If an exam is tomorrow and you're short of time, read how to study the night before an exam.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours a day should I study in exam week?
There's no magic number. Several focused sessions of questions with breaks, while keeping a normal sleep schedule, beat long days of re-reading. Stop when your answers start getting worse.
Should I pull an all-nighter before an exam?
It's usually a bad trade. Research links giving up sleep to study more with worse academic performance the next day. Go to bed and do a short recall round in the morning instead.
How do I study for two exams on the same day?
Split the days before by subject, keep both warm with daily questions, and on the evening before do a short mixed recall round covering both, then sleep.
Is it too late to start revising in exam week?
No. Questions on your weakest topics give you the most return for the time left. Skip re-reading and go straight to practice.
Sources
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
- Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35(6), 481–498.
- Gillen-O'Neel, C., Huynh, V. W., & Fuligni, A. J. (2013). To study or to sleep? The academic costs of extra studying at the expense of sleep. Child Development, 84(1), 133–142.
- Ramirez, G., & Beilock, S. L. (2011). Writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom. Science, 331(6014), 211–213.
