How To Revise Maths Effectively

Revising Maths Effectively

1. Topic Content

Understanding the content is the first thing anyone should be focusing on when it comes to revising Maths. If you don`t have a tutor/teacher to help you with this, YouTube is an excellent source of learning. By the end of this stage, you should be able to explain the concept in question to someone else, and doing so to a friend or parent is a great way to consolidate everything you have learned.

2. Topic Specific Past Paper Questions

To consolidate your knowledge of a topic [and to establish a link between your understanding and ability to answer questions], you need to do topic specific questions. For some topics, you may need to gather the questions yourself or find a question bank. After doing these, you should familiarise yourself with the mark schemes for the different types of questions you can get. This will help you learn what you should/shouldn`t put down to help you get full marks wherever you can. Make sure you know the amount of working you need to show [you don`t want to write too much as this is cumulatively going to be a waste of time, and too little may not get you all the marks].

3. Full Past Paper Practice

This one is quite simple really. Just practice some past papers in one full go. Some questions may require a combination of knowledge from more than one topic, so it`s important you get the hang of this. Don`t worry too much about the time for now [don`t spend hours on it, but going 20-30 minutes over the time limit is okay at this point]. However, just because this step doesn`t account for timing, practice these papers as if you are under timed conditions [i.e. no mid-paper snack, daydreaming, Netflix etc.].

4. Timed Past Paper Practice/Topic Specific Practice

Whilst this step, again, may seem relatively self-explanatory, timing yourself is key to mastering your exam technique. First do past papers under the given time period [generally 90 minutes or so depending on the exam board and paper number]. This will build up your concentration capacity [i.e. you can maintain the same level of focus and accuracy for all questions rather than just the first few]. Then do some papers with 10-15 minutes cut off the time slot [e.g. 75 minutes]. This will make sure that you are confident in working in the time period, and that you have enough time to check [several times!]. Wherever you find a type of question/topic particularly challenging, practice topic specific questions under timed conditions. Generally, you want to be spending longer on questions worth more marks. To figure out how much time you should be spending, look at the time and number of marks available. If there are 60 marks available for a 90 minute paper, each mark should take a minute and a half [so a four mark question should take you six minutes].

5. Extension Work

For those of you that want to be aiming for the highest grades [9/A*], doing some relevant extension work is a good way to ensure that you bag marks from those final questions towards the end of the paper. If, for example, the topic you are looking at is Calculus, then the extension work you may be interested in reading/researching about would be something like the first principles. For more details on this, see some other resources on my page.

On a final note, good luck with your exams! :)