📚 Exam revision plan checklist

A syllabus is everything you're meant to know; a revision plan is the order you're going to learn it in and the day each part gets done. Build the second before the exam is close enough to panic about the first.

19 items

1. Full syllabus or specification for every subjectThe exam board's official document, not just what's in an exercise book — it lists everything examinable, including whatever a teacher ran out of time to cover.
2. Exam dates, times and locations for every paperWrite them all down together — clashes and gaps only become obvious once they're side by side.
3. Every topic listed and rated by confidence
4. Red, amber or green against each one
5. Re-rated after every practice paper, not left as a first guess
6. Weakest topics scheduled firstWhile there's still time to fix them — leaving the hardest subject for the final week only guarantees it stays the hardest.
7. Revision blocked into an actual calendar, not just a listA list of topics with no day attached gets done in whatever order feels easiest, which is rarely the order that helps most.
8. Past papers×5Five years' worth where possible — check which years still match the current specification if the format's changed recently.
9. Mark schemes for every past paperMarking your own paper against the actual scheme teaches you how marks are lost, not just what the right answer was.
10. Timed practice under real exam conditionsNo phone, no extra time, the same paper length the exam uses — the first time you sit under those conditions shouldn't be the exam itself.
11. Study materials gathered somewhere findable
12. Textbooks and class notes
13. Flashcards or a spaced-repetition app set up
14. A fixed place to revise, sorted before the timetable startsTable, chair, plug socket, decided in advance — not negotiated fresh every session.
15. Breaks built into the timetable, not just sessionsA plan of solid three-hour blocks is a plan that gets abandoned by day three.
16. A weekly review slotTen minutes to check what actually got covered against what the plan said would — the two drift apart faster than expected.
17. A backup plan for a missed dayOne day off doesn't matter if the timetable has slack built in. It matters a lot if the whole plan assumes nothing ever goes wrong.
18. Final few days kept for review onlyNo new topics in the last stretch — it's for consolidating, not for panicking into something unfamiliar.
19. Sleep protected in exam weekA late revision session the night before costs more in recall than it adds in content.