How to Revise for Mocks With Over a Week to Go

hey friends and welcome back to another video if you're new here my name is ray and i'm a second year cambridge student studying physics and in 2019 i achieved 40 stars at a level in this video we will be going over what i think is the most effective way to study for gcs in a level box that offers the highest return on time invested we will be focusing on the science and math space subjects but much of what we discussed will be applicable to some of the humanities we will be assuming that we've done no real revision of until now and would like to do well in both our mocks and our real exams as always timestamps will be in the description below so let's get straight to the video

firstly while i may not seem like it we do have a decent understanding of the topics we've covered so far just by paying attention in class i personally felt like i knew nothing about all my subjects on planet vacations even days before my real exams but when i saw an exam question then everything to do with that topic would come flowing back into my mind i like to think of it as if someone asks you to list every movie you've ever seen then it wouldn't be difficult for you to remember then because your brain doesn't store information in a list like format but if someone asks you to list every movie you've seen that has a wizard then it'll be easier for you to remember the hobbits lord of the rings and harry potter that's because the trigger word here is a wizard in fact these are trilogies will remind you of other trilogies like hunger games and divergent or something so whilst they may not seem like it we know more than we think we do which is clear when we see an exam question although we do know more about some topics numbers the question then becomes how do we figure out which topics are in most need of attention for the more recent topics we should be able to remember that we didn't quite understand electrolysis when it was code three weeks ago but for topics three months ago it may be more difficult to remember whether or not we fully understood it so our first step is then to find out which topics will offer us the highest return on investment if we go over them so my recommendation is

that we attempt to do practice questions on a range of topics and use these as a guide file revision ideally using a past paper as they combine many different topics together but topic tests can also be useful and i know you're probably thinking but should we even be doing topic tests or past papers when we don't know everything about every topic but remember that the real value in the past paper comes from it helping us figure out which topics we need to focus on the most based on which questions we got right otherwise we'll just think oh i need to revise search on such a topic because i haven't covered it for a while only to realize after an hour of revising it that we already knew 80 of the material on the other hand we may think we know everything about a topic but it turns out we're only kidding ourselves because we can't do an exam question on it so the best way to make sure is by doing some practice questions that said we can't do topic test after topic test and password after past paper hoping to improve this is the most effective strategy either in between these tests we should take a step back and look at which questions we got wrong go over and relearn the relevant part of the topic make corrections then move on to the next test now in the case of most subjects there are three outcomes for any question that we do one we get the question right and surprise ourselves because we know more than we thought we did two we get it partially right and three we get it all wrong all contents right of course we should prioritize the third case by first understanding content by having a look over our notes from class or watching a few youtube videos explaining the topic using cgpro revision guides explaining the topic to a friend and everything else we usually do to revise once we understand the topic we have to remember it so we don't forget it again by the time our mocks or our real exams comes around so rather than wasting time making pretty notes on the topic it's more effective to use the most important principles in studying active recall and space repetition if you haven't heard of these before then i would recommend checking out the videos in the description which helps to explain this to use these principles we should make flashcards on anki or quizlet then test ourselves on this newly learned or and understood content as often as a flashcard comes up which involves checking anki or quizlet every day if you don't know what ikea is then i would recommend watching the video i have linked above right now this ensures that we can answer a question on that topic in the short term during our mocs and also in the long term when it comes up on the real exam after making these flashcards it's a good idea to reattempt the question to ensure that we now understand the topic we can also take a picture of this question and put into a hard questions folder on our phone computer cloud storage so we can come back and attempt it again shortly before our exams now after addressing all the questions we could not answer we now need to consider the second case where we get questions partially correct either we are missing a small bit of information from that topic or we just need to practice more in the case of the former we should identify the piece of a topic that we don't understand and repeat the process we discussed before in the case of latter we should practice a few more questions on that topic as with each question we practice the easier it becomes we may also be missing some key words from our vocabulary that the mock scheme likes to use in which case is helpful to make a note of these on a separate piece of paper and add these keywords onto our notes or flash cards so that we can learn these this strategy ensures that we're covering the topics we find hardest whilst getting some exam practice in and making flashcards on topics we find the most difficult which we can use in both the shorts and long term we shouldn't bother making notes unless we plan to turn them into flashcards otherwise we will just forget about them personally i only made brief notes so i can make sense of the topic before turning them into flashcards so i'll be

using a level chemistry as an example here say that i'm in year 13 and i have a mod coming up on all the as content and the a2 content we covered between september to december for this i could give you a topic test on all uh the topics in start of year 12 by going to chemistry ocra and then for each of the module modules i can find all these topic tests over here or instead i could do an as paper for a single year so let's go to an as paper by going to past papers and then going to chemistry ocra and i can do one year of as past papers so let's say do a specimen paper and then alongside that i could also do some topic tests on the content we've covered since you have since september of year 13 by going back to ocra and then going to module 5 in module 6 and picking out the relevant topics so that reduces the number of topic tests i have to do because there are a lot of topic tests uh for a lot of the eight year 12 content but if you can combine that all together into a single past paper or two then that's much better for your time then based on the questions i could and couldn't do i can decide what to revise until i'm able to do that topic and to make sure i can do that topic i can do a few individual questions from that topic by going back and finding some topic tests again if you can't find the questions you want here on physics math tutor then just a quick google search of say gcse physics electricity questions should be able to help you but ultimately tackling a lot of topics by doing a past paper or two should be able to save you quite a bit of time and help you decide on what to

revise so since we improved the most by working on the edge of our current abilities i find it helpful to skip questions which are far too easy for example if a question asks me to factorize some quadratics then i will skip it because i've done it countless times before so spending another minute on this won't really help although if you do this don't lie to yourself by telling yourself that you can do questions which you can't do it requires some judgment which you'll get better at with practice also if you have a few friends i want to study together with you then you can use this as an opportunity to debate or discuss answers this can be done by agreeing on a set of questions attempting them on the same day by yourselves scanning in the solutions and having a zoom call where you share your screen every couple of days during your zoom cards you can compare and discuss your answers to find out where your misunderstandings lie and work on patching them up i would suggest using zoom if you're meeting with two or more people because of the 40 minute timeline that they haven't caused since there's a hassle to set up a new meeting it means that if you finish early then you won't sit around for hours chatting but if the time runs out and you didn't completely finish your study session then you can just set up a new meeting with a bit of effort

after milks i recommend staying on top of the content you're learning in class by continuing to make flashcards on information in topics that you feel like you may forget and going through them daily and doing exam questions soon after you learn a topic to ensure you understand it then there otherwise if you leave it too late then the next thing you know you have to understand half the subject for the first time because remember that revision is easier and takes less time after you've understood something for the first time and when you get an extra hour or two free during the week then you should go over and make flashcards on anything else you feel like you may forget from your pre-december content and continue to go through the flashcards daily but if you finish your remote revision early and feel prepared then you can also do that sooner i know

the strategy may feel uncomfortable because it's not quite what we're used to doing when revising and it can even seem sporadic by making flashcards for some topics and not others but remember that by working on the edge of our creative abilities by using practice questions as a guide allows us to improve the most rapidly if we work too much inside our comfort zone then we won't be improving as much and if we work too far outside then we'll get frustrated and not improve as fast anyways that's it for me if you found the video useful then leave a like if not leave a dislike let me know why if you have any questions about anything i mentioned then leave a comment down below and i'll try to get back to you but for now i'll see you next time