How to revise for A levels? (physics, maths)

Hey guys,

I have been having trouble with my physics AS so I thought I would start with some revision for mock tests and things like that. However I cannot seem to find any good solution to retaining this information.

I have gone through the text book and answered some summary questions only to find that the wording of the questions in the exam papers has gotten me confused. I then tried some past papers and just about scraped a C in both on my first go, I then evaluated them with another pen and tried again a day later to get a B in both. It then came to my attention that I probably wasn't learning anything but instead just remembering the exam papers.

For my GCSEs I essentially rewrote the official science revision books out over and over again until I remembered it off by heart and for maths I went over past papers over and over again. Of course most people would say this kind of revision was bad since I was doing it 6 hours every session.

I need some other method of revision as physics and most of my maths modules do not have dedicated revision guides.

Any resources or methods of revision would be appreciated.

-Binary

Past papers are your best friends this year.

Do every one of them as many times as possible, you can start to predict the questions that they ask (especially in maths). Just build from the basics of each topic, at this stage of the year, doing that will be plenty. I found that the best way to revise was to do as many questions as possible on a specific topic you were weakest at (from doing papers), find where I was making the mistakes and then revising that part of the topic...putting together as comprehensive a set of notes as possible. Also, even the mark schemes are useful as they tell you exactly what the examiner is looking for in an answer (i.e the exact terms used in a definition).

As I said, predicting the questions is easy in AS Maths, I would identify every topic asked in each paper and you'll notice that there are topics more regularly examined than others.