The last two weeks before an exam

With fourteen days left, the goal stops being coverage and becomes performance. You are no longer trying to know everything. You are trying to convert what you already know into marks.

Students resist this. Two weeks out there is always a topic that was never properly understood, and the temptation is to finally sit down and master it. Usually that is the wrong call — the marks are cheaper elsewhere.

Week one: rehearse

One full paper a day, under real conditions. Correct time limit, no notes, no phone, no breaks in the middle. Mark it the same evening while you still remember your reasoning.

Keep a running list of every recurring mistake. Not every mistake — the recurring ones. By the end of the week that list will be short, specific, and far more useful than any textbook chapter.

Week two: narrow

Now work only on two things: your recurring mistakes, and the topics that appear most often in past papers. Nothing else. No new material, no starting a chapter you have never opened.

This feels uncomfortably narrow, and that is correct. Breadth was week one's job and the term before it. Week two is about closing the specific gaps you have evidence for.

The last 48 hours

Light recall only. Formulas, definitions, dates, the one-line facts. Nothing heavy, nothing new, and no all-nighters.

On sleep, I am unusually firm with students, because the evidence is not ambiguous: a tired brain loses more marks through misreading questions and careless slips than an extra chapter could ever gain you. Sleep is part of the revision plan, not a break from it.

On exam morning

Eat something. Arrive early enough that you are not rushing. Do not stand outside the hall quizzing each other — it is the fastest way to manufacture panic about a topic that may not even appear.

Read the whole paper before writing. Start with a question you can definitely answer, so the first thing you do is bank marks and settle your nerves.