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Grade 8s and 9s students revision

Hi so to all the smart amazing people our there willing to answer,

How much did you revise
I am currently doing 9 gcses predicted four 6s 4 7s
And an 8 I'm in yr 11 and school has just started
I haven't alot during the holidays and I'm regretting it.i want to start now tho as I'm rlly busy
Monday:cadets 6-10 30(getting ready and until I'm back home
Tuesday 5-6 I'm starting soanish lessons to get a certificate of fluency(I'm Hispanic)
Wednesday cadets
Thursday 2 hrs of chores
Friday nothing
And weekends I go round my dad's every other week coming back home on a Sunday at 4/5
I could ask to go home at like 3 but I'm stressing out

I'm planing to onky go cadets 3/4times every two weeks from December and in February cutting to 1/2
And after Easter none
Help.i stress alot so I'm just venting

Reply 1

{Moss}

I find that it really depends on how confident you are with your subjects. I did a lot of past papers (which are the holy grail in my opinion :smile:

) to find out approximately where I was at, and then focused on the subjects I did less well with. When you've got it in your head, you only need to do maybe weekly revision in order to concrete it in there.

Note, too: some say that you need to do about 4 hours of revision a day, but that's a gross exaggeration: what's more important is what you find good. I'd also say it's always better to aim for an 8 rather than a 9, as 9s are much harder to get, and it also means less stress for you: when you get to that level, you can start aiming higher (both are very admirable, and also you're want to achieve these is very admirable :smile:

). Obviously that's just my opinion though. For aiming 8-9s the CGP books, e.g. Biology grade 8- workbook, are really useful for practicing those questions.

I digressed a little bit there haha, sorry. In regard to actual times, I found that nearer exams (e.g. post Christmas, even post-Christmas half-term) about an hour a day is enough to do really well. That's about 1 hour for each subject in total, but do this how you think - as an example, Maths was one of my favorite subjects so I only did about 1/2 an hour of revision each week, to remember equations and such. On the other hand, I struggled more with chemistry so did about 1 and a 1/4 to 1 and a 1/2 hours of that per week. It's all in the balancing!

Pre-Christmas, again balance is important but I would say that it's good to do maybe 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week. That's enough to get you gearing up for actual GCSE revision, without causing too much pain (in my eyes). Again though, this depends how confident you feel: for example you might want to do some more if you're feeling less confident.

As a little aside, if you do revision constantly, like every week, doing more at one point can actually mean doing less later on. By that point it's often in your mind, so you can relax a bit, but that's dependent on a lot of things.

You might also find that, at times, you're in a better mindset - if so, feel free to do maybe 2 hours of revision in a day to give yourself a break another day. Also, it's fine to have breaks. If you're feeling really tired, just leave it - don't push it back, because that's just even more work and stress later, just leave it. Mental health is vitally important in achieving good grades, and having free time is the most important thing for that in turn.

To shorten that, I'd say about 45 minutes 5-days a week (or more if you feel like it) is good before the Christmas break/half-term after. Then you might want to up it to maybe an hour a day, leaving it on about 3 days. Then post-Easter (when you should have more time as you say) you could up it to maybe an hour a day 6 days a week. As I've said, this is really up to you: if I recall correctly, I generally did about an hour every day in the week, especially closer to exams, then I left Friday and sometimes Sunday to wind down completely, and did about 2 hours on Saturday. It's all about how you feel.

Now, revision is a very subjective idea, and this is just my advice and experiences :smile:

. It's really worth tinkering with it to see what fits you, and hopefully you can get some other ideas from others. Depending on how you are, too, you might need a timetable to motivate you. Hope this helps at least slightly! Best of luck :biggrin:

P.S. if you haven't looked into them, research techniques and methods such as Blurting and the Pomodoro technique are really good for strong callback or revision sessions.

Reply 2

3redff

Revise for your in schools exams especially mocks (treat them like the real thing to see how capable you are). I started revising properly from Feb-Mar. The amount of work depends how much you struggle with a subject. For example I struggled a lot with Maths and revised from end of yr10 to GCSEs whereas I barely revised Geography because I felt more comfortable and confident and in the end I got a better grade from Geography even though I revised less but I still got a good grade in maths and I would never get that if I didn't work hard and commit.