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Efficient Revising as a Student
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Efficient Revising as a Student

Written by Sam | November 20, 2018

Revision Tips/Hacks Want to know some quick revision hacks to help you revise? As it’s coming to exam season, we are all nervous about when to start revising, what’s the best way to get all that information into our brains, and then back out again once we are sat in a dreaded exam hall! Here we want to share some tips with you about what you can do to help make your revision easier and more memorable! Give it a try!

Get your room straight before

We all know that when we are revising our rooms are always spotless, why? Because we spend a lot of time procrastinating tidying it. Let’s make sure we get it done right at the start of our revision period and keep it that way so we don’t let that become an excuse. After all, you don’t want to say, I failed my exams because I spent too much time cleaning my room!

 Create a timetable

Revision is not about sitting at a desk and staring at your papers for hours on end praying that information will transport itself into the brain. If you have a schedule of your day, it means that you are statistically more likely to stick to it and fit in other sections of your life. For example, say every day you schedule 8-11 am as your revision hours. In those hours you have breaks at certain points, have everything set up, and stick to it. It then means once those hours are completed you can have lunch out, go and see friends whatever you want. Why? Because that’s what you’ve scheduled in, then say for instance you go back to revising 6-9 pm in the evening. 6 hours in a day of revising is quite acceptable.

Take breaks regularly

As you may have seen before, schedule your breaks in, just as if you work in a job, get your holidays in. This way, it can give you something to look forward to. It can give you motivation, if you take ad hoc breaks you will find that you are more likely to slip into the trap of checking social media for longer than expected! So plan when your breaks are and how long they will be. This will give you focus!

Choose your timings

When we start to revise, we will get up and put our heads straight in the book not to waste time. Is this a good idea? Will be receptive to information or re we likely to wander off in our daydreams? And do you start to lose concentration around 2/3 after lunch? It is a good idea to then think what times you are most awake, as in after you have had your morning coffee or breakfast. That’s when we are statistically most awake, then we have lunch and then it goes down and rises again at around 2.30 pm. So if you can fit your pattern to suit times when you are able to concentrate you will learn a lot more in a lot less time. That’s the best option!

Make notes

As you work your way through your course notes, always try and make your notes more and more concise. This way it will create trigger words in your mind that will expand into sentences from one word! Incredible I know! Put them on post-it notes and put them around and on things that you see daily. A good example is a door if you put a note on the door that links to some revision material that will start to go into your sub-conscience and it will also remind you of that subject! As you leave more and more notes around you should then be able to recite all the information that goes with those few words on a post-it note!

Reward yourself

When you have completed a big task or have completed a good stretch of revision where you have felt like you have learned a lot. You NEED to reward yourself! By doing this it tells your brain that if you work hard, you get a reward. The reward can be something as little as chocolate or as much as a meal with your friends and more! But the trick is the reward if not, you need to find something else that will motivate you. Such as, you do a good day of revision, you buy a game that you want to play after exams! It can be anything!

Podcasts and study grams

Podcasts and study grams are a great way to learn. Podcasts you can listen to subliminally and they can be put into your mind, plus it’s like revising while not doing too much. That’s great, isn’t it? Revising and not actually revising! However, I would suggest that if you are listening to podcasts it is always best to review it after they have finished and make notes. The good thing with podcasts and the modern world is that you can listen to them more than once, you can even put them on x2 speed so it talks faster, thus saving EVEN more time! Study grams are good because if you find the right one, then you can use their notes and methods. Plus if you don’t find the right ones, you might pick up some good tips which will work for you!

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