Struggling with revision? Here's how to prepare for exams more efficiently

Abby Young-Powell in The Guardian


If you’re one to put hours into revising for an exam only to be disappointed with the results, then you may need to rethink your revision methods. You could be wasting time on inefficient techniques, says Bradley Busch, a registered psychologist and director of InnerDrive. “You get people putting in lots of effort, but not in a directed way,” he says. Here are some of the common ways students unwittingly waste study time, and what experts recommend you do instead. 

Re-reading and highlighting notes

Re-reading and highlighting notes may feel like work, but it often won’t achieve much. The same goes for spending hours drawing up a revision timetable. Instead, psychologists recommend a technique called retrieval practice. This is anything that makes your brain work to come up with an answer. It can include doing quizzes, multiple choice tests, and past papers. “To really learn something, you’ve got to transfer information from working memory into long term memory, where you can store and later retrieve it,” says David Cox, a neuroscientist and journalist. “Committing something to long term memory isn’t easy, so it shouldn’t feel easy.”

Last-minute cramming

Beware of the planning fallacy, which is our tendency to underestimate how much time we really need to do something. It leads to sitting outside the exam hall with two hours to spare, desperately cramming. This is not an effective way to learn. “The information you gain quickly, you can lose quickly too,” says Busch.

The opposite of cramming is spacing, which is the practice of spacing out your revision over time, doing little and often. So one hour a day for seven days is better than cramming seven hours into one day, for example. It’s also good to incorporate interleaving into your revision. This is a fancy way of saying you should mix up your subjects during a revision session. “It forces you to think about the problem and the strategy you come up with,” says Busch.

Making a study playlist

Sifting through the recommended study playlists on Spotify, trying to work out which songs will help you to concentrate, is usually a waste of time. But while listening to music can help you relax, and some students may have “trained” themselves to concentrate with it on, it’s still better to study in silence, Cox says. “You’re never going to be as productive having music on in the background, because it’s preventing your brain from acting at maximum capacity.”

Checking your phone

We may check our phones as often as once every 12 minutes. Obviously, this is a major distraction. That’s not all: research has shown that just having your phone in sight when you revise is enough to negatively affect your concentration, even if you don’t use it. And it’s a common trap to fall into. “I usually have my phone on silent mode, but to be honest, if it’s there I always check it,” says Chiara Fiorillo, who studies at City, University of London. Ideally it’s best to banish your phone to another room altogether.