If you have a week, the instinct is to start at lecture one and read forward until you run out of time. That usually ends with neat notes on the first half of the module and nothing on the rest. With a week, the job is triage: decide what to know well, test yourself on it, and practise answering the questions you will actually face.
Day 1: Triage
- Check the format. How many questions, how much choice, how long, closed or open book? This decides how many topics you need.
- Read two or three past papers. Note which topics come up most and how questions are worded.
- Read the learning outcomes in the module handbook. Questions are written to test them.
- Choose your topics. If you answer three questions from eight, aim to know four or five topics well, so you still have a choice on the day. For example, if three years of past papers each had a question on topics A, C and F, and two of three had one on D, those four are your core, plus one more you already feel strong on as a spare.
- Make a timetable for the six days left, giving each chosen topic at least two sessions on different days.
Days 2 to 4: Learn by testing yourself
For each topic, in short focused blocks:
- Make a one-page map from your notes, slides or the lecture transcript: the main ideas, key terms, evidence and what the lecturer flagged. Keep it to one page.
- Turn it into questions. Flashcards for facts and definitions, a couple of exam-style questions for the arguments.
- Test yourself with the map closed. Blank-page recall works well here; see the blurting method.
- Come back to yesterday's topic at the start of each day before moving on. Spacing your reviews, even over a few days, beats doing a topic once (Cepeda et al., 2006).
Resist the urge to make perfect notes. Practice testing is one of the two techniques with the strongest evidence behind it; rereading and highlighting are among the weakest (Dunlosky et al., 2013). With a week, every hour spent formatting notes is an hour not spent remembering them.
Days 5 and 6: Past papers under exam conditions
- Sit at least one full past paper timed, with no notes. Then mark it against your notes and the marking criteria.
- Spend the next session on what went wrong. Was it missing knowledge, or knowing it but not using it to answer the question?
- Plan answers to several more questions in ten minutes each: a thesis, three points, the evidence.
- Keep doing your flashcards, focusing on the ones you miss.
Day 7: The day before
- A light pass through your hardest flashcards and your one-page maps.
- No new topics. If something has not gone in by now, a panicked evening will not fix it.
- Check the practical details: time, room, what you are allowed to bring.
- Stop early and sleep.
Why sleep is part of the plan
Staying up all night can feel like the committed choice. It is usually the worst trade of the week. Sleep plays an active part in consolidating newly learned material into memory (Diekelmann and Born, 2010), so cutting it undoes some of the day's work, and a tired brain is slower at the recall and reasoning an exam needs. Protect your sleep across the whole week, not just the night before.
If you have several exams in the same week
Interleave them. Two topics from different modules in a day, rather than a whole day on one, gives each topic more spaced sessions. Prioritise by weighting and by how far behind you are on each, not by which exam comes first.
If you missed lectures
Do not try to rewatch them. Use the transcript or captions to build the one-page map, and only play the minutes you do not understand. Our guide on revising a module when you are behind on lectures goes into this in detail. NoteMate can turn a lecture recording into notes, flashcards and a quiz quickly, which helps when time is the problem; for text you already have, the free lecture-to-flashcards tool needs no account.
The habit that stops this happening again is the one NoteMate's founder, Ben, would give any first-year:
Never skip a lecture, and even worse, never skip a lecture because you haven't caught up on the last one. It's a slippery slope.
And if this is the plan you are using because the exam crept up on you, next term try the six-week version. It is the same techniques with more room for spacing.
Sources
- Dunlosky, J. et al. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
- Cepeda, N. J. et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
- Diekelmann, S. and Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2762