I got forced to study english lit and didn't actually get off my ass until just before mocks, went from a U to a B in mocks and in the real exam I got an A
I read through all the books (helped so much more that I enjoyed the exam texts) and literally annotated everything
unfortunately after my mocks, my mum accidentally gave away all my texts to charity (couldn't find them to buy back) and i went the rest of the year revising without a copy of the texts so i ended up writing out a list of common and short quotes i could remember and wrote out 10 critic quotes to memories.
I kept a notebook, about 4 pages of quotes to do with each character, then pages on context, pages on critics.
getting the york notes revision guides for your texts are also particularly helpful
My teacher also told me that if you're given an exam question about a character, it's helpful to write about the themes in paragraphs to do with the character, if you're given a theme question write about charaters per paragraph to do with the theme.
for poetry, annotate all the poems, gather as much context and then memorise short quotes across the poems that are easy to link.
also for annotating, my teachers said write a long-medium sized ish quote and then pick out short quotes within that to embed and comment/analyse on
you can definitely pass
I spent the first term determined to drop it, argued with all my teachers and never did any work or attended lessons till I had to admit that they were never gonna let me drop it so I cracked on.