When Should You Start Revising and for How Long? | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to my series on studying effectively for gcse's nay lovers in this video we will be answering the age old question of when should i start revising and for how long so let's get straight to the video so i think the most common misconception that people are asking this question hack is that they imagine revision to be something where you lock yourself up in a room and spend 10 hours a day rereading the revision guide over and over until its contents are burnt into memory and then doing every single past paper in existence until you know the subject inside out only to then forget about it after the exam for those people this means that there's some narrow window in which you have to start revising because if you start too soon then you'll be burnt out and if you start too late then you won't do as well whilst i'm sure that some people have done this exact thing and achieved good results i don't think this is feasible for most people for obvious reasons thankfully effective studying is nothing like that and the narrow window in which you have to start revising doesn't exist as we will learn more about later in the series effective studying is based on two key principles space repetition and active recall it's as simple as that i will mention those words here and again and you may not know what they mean but do bear with me here there are two ways i think about the situation the first is that studying effectively multiplies the time we spend and if we can incorporate the principles of active recall and space repetition into our studying then studying for one hour a day can be better than someone else studying for six hours a day who hasn't incorporated these two principles and is instead rereading and highlighting textbook think of effects of studying as a time multiplier many people in my sixth home thought the reason i did well in topic tests and mock exams was because i study a ridiculous number of hours each night but they were often surprised to learn i studied less hours in them the misconception they had was that they thought the reason they weren't getting as good results was because they had to study for longer using their ineffective techniques and it's natural for them to assume that everyone else is using the same techniques but are studying for longer this goes to show it's not about the hours we put in it's about what we're doing during those hours so asking someone how many hours they studied every day is a pretty useless question unless you know what they're doing during those hours the second way i think about this is say that using effective techniques like active recall and space repetition we have to hypothetically spend 250 hours outside of class to get an a star a level and this number is likely to be less than gcse and say that we've never done any revision before and started 50 days before our exams then we would have to study for five hours a day to achieve an a-star but if we started 250 days before or about eight months ago then we would only have to study for about an hour a day of course these 250 hours will depend from person's person and subject subjects but you do get the idea if we start early then we don't have to study more we're just spreading the x number of hours of effective studying to achieve a some grade over a longer time period meaning that we can do less each day but not get bent out but now the fact we're starting early is no multiplier studying for 20 hours using the currency of active recall and space repetition spaced over 20 days is much better than doing it over two days with 10 hours a day because we have more nights of sleep in between for the 20 days with each night of sleep we had the opportunity to grow new synapse connections in our brain for any new information we learned that day and this also helps form connections between different ideas more regularly think of this as building a house in two days compared to 20 days the house built in two days won't be as sturdy because there hasn't been enough time for the water between the layers of break to dry likewise cramming the same information in two days and not 20 days won't give you enough time when sleeping for the information to stick and for you to see connections between different concepts so when should we start studying the answer is today but after watching the series of course even if you're at the start of year 10 then you can make your life much easier by starting now rather than waiting believe me i started small at start of year 12 and about two to three weeks before my exams i'd mostly ran out of things to do apart from doing the old exam question here and there and continuing to go to my flashcards i ended up binge watching tv shows and youtube and playing games and still managed to achieve 40 stars at a level whilst binge watching and playing games just before exam period is not a good idea it goes to show you the power of these techniques the sooner you start the easier your life will be and the more free time you will have day to do things you enjoy rather than having to lock yourself up in your room for weeks and forcing yourself to sleep for 10 hours a day or something ridiculous because you didn't start sooner but that's basically for this video thanks for watching and i'll see you next one