How do you revise to get top grades?

I also did maths, chemistry and physics at AS and for me it was just constant past papers practice. I sat the official AS exams at the end of year 12 and scored A in all three (A is the highest grade at AS).

Have you done any past papers yet?

Wow you’re doing four a levels? 😅

Anyway I do chemistry and what I do is I use the revision guide and make loads of flashcards to test myself over and over again. Then I move on to exam questions, I use physics and maths tutor for that. Then I do loads of past papers. Any question I get wrong, I write it down and I make sure I understand what the mark scheme wants. When I’ve done all the past papers, I’m planning to do them all again because it’s good practice

Thank you for your response!
How about learning the content? Did you use flashcards? Also how did you make notes?
When you did past papers, how often did you do them? Did you see a change/improvement in your scores immediately??

Ive only done one or two for chemistry, but that's it. I'm just worried I'll run out of papers.

Sorry for asking so many questions 💛

I feel like my revision strategies aren't good enough for me to get top scores. 😭😭😭 Does anyone have any tips/advice- would greatly appreciate! How do you revise? What's your revision work flow, from learning in class, to exams?

I do maths FM physics and chemistry, taking all four at A2 I think.

If you want maybe please could you working at grade if that's ok??

Thanks so much <3

I didn't use flashcards for chemistry or physics because there isn't much content - it's more calculations. To understand the base knowledge, I went through every past paper I could find and then made a large word doc of all the common questions and their answers (using the mark scheme). Many questions are repeated year in, year out so by doing this, I effectively memorised the gold standard answer (i.e. the mark scheme answer) for the "wordy" questions. There will obviously be some questions which are new every year, so before starting past papers, I made my own notes (nothing fancy) on the content because I personally learn using the "little and often" technique (i.e. the more I read/ write it, the more I remember it).

For all 3, I also completed all the questions in the textbook.

In terms of running out of past papers - I kept the most recent papers for last but for all the others, I intentionally kept redoing them because it helped me see where by weaknesses and strengths were (e.g. If I kept getting the same question wrong, then clearly I needed to work on that area). For maths, there are so many papers including the gold, silver and bronze on physicsandmathstutor.com that I didn't run out of resources. I would strongly recommend that website, it has lots of practice papers as well as papers with questions on certain topics. I used all of the resources on there for all of my subjects.

For initial learning, I’m a read and highlight sort of fella for the first pass.
After this, I’d say self-testing with resources like Quizlet (essentially online flash cards) and writing stuff out by memory - incidentally, the combination of a large window and dry-wipe markers is excellent for an at-home whiteboard if you’re a visual learner.

Following initial knowledge acquisition, I’d say that for all sciences and maths (I did biol/chem/maths/phys for AS and A2) past papers are your best friend - excellent both for refining your exam technique in terms of understanding how papers are marked and what examiners are looking for, and also because examiners tend to be a bit lazy and recycle questions (or variations of questions) through over the years!

Hope this helps

I didn't use flashcards for chemistry or physics because there isn't much content - it's more calculations. To understand the base knowledge, I went through every past paper I could find and then made a large word doc of all the common questions and their answers (using the mark scheme). Many questions are repeated year in, year out so by doing this, I effectively memorised the gold standard answer (i.e. the mark scheme answer) for the "wordy" questions. There will obviously be some questions which are new every year, so before starting past papers, I made my own notes (nothing fancy) on the content because I personally learn using the "little and often" technique (i.e. the more I read/ write it, the more I remember it).

For all 3, I also completed all the questions in the textbook.

In terms of running out of past papers - I kept the most recent papers for last but for all the others, I intentionally kept redoing them because it helped me see where by weaknesses and strengths were (e.g. If I kept getting the same question wrong, then clearly I needed to work on that area). For maths, there are so many papers including the gold, silver and bronze on physicsandmathstutor.com that I didn't run out of resources. I would strongly recommend that website, it has lots of practice papers as well as papers with questions on certain topics. I used all of the resources on there for all of my subjects.