Have I left revision too late?

Had a little panic last night because my GCSEs start in 4 months! We’re currently doing mocks and when they’re over I’ll have just over three months. I take 11 subjects and want to get high results is that likely or am I being overly ambitious? (I don’t really know science paper 2s at all and there are some components in the others that I haven’t been tested on and basically don’t know at all).

Reply 1

StingRay123

3

4 months isn't too less. Start spamming past papers and revising past notes. Going over topic questions is the most important right now as content has been taught, but exam technique? Not so much, and exam technique's half the equation. Stay focused and everything will be alright!

Reply 2

Ghostlady

21

You are not too late. I remember my two daughters when they did it they started around this time and had a little after school time table going. Half hour on geography, half hour on maths etc etc, just to make it more interesting and your not disengaging by doing one topic for several hours. Videos on you tube for some subjects. I tend to like amoeba sisters for biology, they tend to explain enzymes and meiosis and chromosomes pretty well and they were like fun cartoons. Primrose kitten is also pretty good. For anything you are not sure about like for science paper 2, then definitely ask your teachers about it and make sure they go through it with you. Your school should also be holding some revision classes as well. The eldest had that app with the tree growing when revising and used that as a timer.

Reply 3

B_____

7

I think it’s fine, i mean my school hasn’t even covered all the science topics idk what they’re doing 😭. For out mocks, we just did half the paper 2 of all sciences… We also haven’t finished the book we study in english, so honestly I think you’re good

Reply 4

Hellopeople!

10

Original post by LadyOfTheGeeks

Had a little panic last night because my GCSEs start in 4 months! We’re currently doing mocks and when they’re over I’ll have just over three months. I take 11 subjects and want to get high results is that likely or am I being overly ambitious? (I don’t really know science paper 2s at all and there are some components in the others that I haven’t been tested on and basically don’t know at all).

you left it too late, should have revised over summer or in yr 10 but dw it will be fine but u gotta study and have no distractions

Reply 5

muirinn16

9

Original post by LadyOfTheGeeks

Had a little panic last night because my GCSEs start in 4 months! We’re currently doing mocks and when they’re over I’ll have just over three months. I take 11 subjects and want to get high results is that likely or am I being overly ambitious? (I don’t really know science paper 2s at all and there are some components in the others that I haven’t been tested on and basically don’t know at all).

3 months is plenty dw! im on my second year of GCSEs but i did my full maths gcse and 10 other modules last year and i started revising two weeks before and came out with top marks. you just have to focus on past papers - revise smarter

Reply 6

fatimagailani

2

I still haven't started revision and I have under 3 months of revision time for my gcse's. I do maths, combined science, English, geo, history, re, drama and German. I don't know how to start and I am kind of panicking. Any help is really appreciated.

Reply 7

vnayak

16

Original post by fatimagailani

I still haven't started revision and I have under 3 months of revision time for my gcse's. I do maths, combined science, English, geo, history, re, drama and German. I don't know how to start and I am kind of panicking. Any help is really appreciated.

Revise smart, not hard.

Do the stuff that you find hard and work on it. For me, I knew that I was going to get 9s in the three sciences and Maths without any problems (provided nothing unprecedented happened on the day). However, the GCSEs which I found troublesome were RS, English Lit and Computing.

So I spent the next few months grinding those subjects and I got decent results in the end. I was getting 9s in RS throughout the year after doing loads of revision for each of the topics but during the test, for some weird reason, I was writing really slowly so I had to sort of blurt whatever I could to the point where I felt my handwriting was barely legible. I still got an 8 and was 2 marks from the grade 9 boundary, which was really annoying and for some weird reason I chose not to re-mark it (probably because I was worried about how subjective RS actually is so my grade could actually go down). In English Lit, I went from a 6 to an 8 in the three months and in Computing, through just going through the revision guides (it's quite comprehensive), I got a 9.

so I would recommend the following:

Maths - past papers, textbook questions, corbettmaths to familiarise with content and GCSE Maths Tutor on YouTube.

Combined Science - FreeScienceLessons and the CGP revision guides (except maybe for Biology but I would still get it if you are struggling to that extent).

English - Mr Everything English and Mr Salles teaches English for lang and for lit, there's a wide range of resources on the physicsandmathstutor website in terms of important quotes you can memorise and techniques in that quote which you can just blurt out on the page. In both lessons, I didn't pay attention to a single word and my copy of the books that we were studying were just blank instead of being full of annotations but these people are genuinely lifesavers. They cover everything and more that your English teacher will have done but in a much shorter space of time so if you just memorise this, you'll be alright. I might be a bad example but my friend did exactly the same thing (I got this idea from him) and he scored 127/130 in English lit and I think he scored something like 140/160 on the English Language (because he ran out of time on the Question 5 on the second paper).

geography - I dropped it in year 9 so I have no clue what to say for this.

history - I dropped it in year 9 so I have no clue what to say for this.

RE - memorise key quotes and look through your notes (it's what helped me). many of the teachings have common quotes which you can link so try to find links between topics and then use these quotes and then just start to waffle a bit.

Drama - Absolutely no clue because I dropped it in year 8.

German - I did Spanish at GCSE so I'm sure you can do similar things. I used Duolingo to pick up complex vocab, which helped me to some extent. Then I spent a lot of time memorising my condensed questions, which covers all of the possible questions I could get asked in the speaking exam. These questions are extremely similar to the ones that appear in the reading and writing exams as well. I would say that you should also create maybe a set of flashcards on either Anki or Quizlet to learn the vocab in the eventuality that you are faced with questions you have absolutely no clue what they mean. In this set of flashcards, also maybe include verb conjugations as that is what I tended to drop my marks in and also maybe key sentence structures (for Spanish, they taught us a structure called T.E. T.O.C.A. but don't ask me what each letter in the abbreviation means because I can't remember for the life of me).

You'll be OK. I did all of my revision in three months and these were the grades I got:

Grade 9 - Maths, Physics(Higher Tier triple science) , Chemistry(Higher Tier triple science) , Biology(Higher Tier triple science), Spanish, English Language, Latin and Computer Science.

Grade 8 - English Literature and RS.

I hope this was helpful. Happy revising!

(edited 2 months ago)

Reply 8

KWad

10

Start now. If you do, you will be fine.

Reply 9

LadyOfTheGeeks

OP

2

Original post by B_____

I think it’s fine, i mean my school hasn’t even covered all the science topics idk what they’re doing 😭. For out mocks, we just did half the paper 2 of all sciences… We also haven’t finished the book we study in english, so honestly I think you’re good

Sorry for the late reply (forgot my password), thankyou for saying that mine still haven’t got anywhere near to the end of some of the courses it’s comforting knowing I’m not the only one 😭🙏

Reply 10

LadyOfTheGeeks

OP

2

Original post by muirinn16

3 months is plenty dw! im on my second year of GCSEs but i did my full maths gcse and 10 other modules last year and i started revising two weeks before and came out with top marks. you just have to focus on past papers - revise smarter

Sorry for the late reply (forgot my password) first of congrats for doing that in two weeks that’s crazy and secondly thanks for saying that it’s really comforting and helpful thankyou 🙏🙏

Reply 11

LadyOfTheGeeks

OP

2

Original post by StingRay123

4 months isn't too less. Start spamming past papers and revising past notes. Going over topic questions is the most important right now as content has been taught, but exam technique? Not so much, and exam technique's half the equation. Stay focused and everything will be alright!

Sorry for the late reply (I forgot my password) thankyouu for your advice it’s really helpful I’ve done a couple past papers before but never really appreciated them like I should’ve, I’ll get on that right away thankyou 🙏🙏

Reply 12

LadyOfTheGeeks

OP

2

Original post by Ghostlady

You are not too late. I remember my two daughters when they did it they started around this time and had a little after school time table going. Half hour on geography, half hour on maths etc etc, just to make it more interesting and your not disengaging by doing one topic for several hours. Videos on you tube for some subjects. I tend to like amoeba sisters for biology, they tend to explain enzymes and meiosis and chromosomes pretty well and they were like fun cartoons. Primrose kitten is also pretty good. For anything you are not sure about like for science paper 2, then definitely ask your teachers about it and make sure they go through it with you. Your school should also be holding some revision classes as well. The eldest had that app with the tree growing when revising and used that as a timer.

Sorry for the late reply (forgot my password) thankyou for saying when your kids started that’s really comforting! I was spending a couple hours on one subject a day but that makes so much sense to do small amounts everyday I’ll definetly change to that thankyou. Thanks for the YouTube recs as well I love amoeba sisters and will check primrose kitten out (I’ve seen her be mentioned a few times on tsr). Anyway thanks a lot for your advice I’ll definitely use it 🙏🙏

Reply 13

LadyOfTheGeeks

OP

2

Original post by Hellopeople!

you left it too late, should have revised over summer or in yr 10 but dw it will be fine but u gotta study and have no distractions

thankyou for the honesty and confidence boost 😭🙏

Reply 14

LadyOfTheGeeks

OP

2

Original post by KWad

Start now. If you do, you will be fine.

Thankyou 🙏🙏

Reply 15

muirinn16

9

Original post by LadyOfTheGeeks

Sorry for the late reply (forgot my password) first of congrats for doing that in two weeks that’s crazy and secondly thanks for saying that it’s really comforting and helpful thankyou 🙏🙏

no problem lmk if you need any advice about specific stuff!