The Student Room Group

gcse cramming - last minute revision

my mocks begin 9th December
I barely paid attention in year 9+10 so I missed a lost of basics

I need all 8s in my mocks for my dream sixthform :frown: possible to achieve? if so advice?
Reply 1
Can ur school provide any extra support like going through missed content/suggesting how to cover ur basics? would u be able to get any tutors? what’s ur work ethic like (do u tend to procrastinate a lot etc)? what r ur working at grades if you know?
Reply 2
contrary to better advice, cramming at GCSE is not impossible. in fact, it is relatively easy (depending on your general level of intellect) to cram for a GCSE exam and still get a good grade, and this in my opinion is the biggest issue with it as you just can't get away with that for A Level and it sets up wrong study habits(but that's irrelevant).

if your mocks are 9th of december you have plenty of time, assuming you only even study 3 hours a day, i think you're set (unless you generally take longer to learn things than the average person, in which case you still have plenty of time but may need to put in a bit more work).

for science: freesciencelessons on youtube are a lifesaver if you don't know basic concepts. I only used his videos and past paper questions to revise for GCSE and got 9 in bio, 9 in physics and 7 in chem. even binging his videos- with full concentration mind you- will work. that's another thing- i don't know about edexcel, but aqa recycled many questions from previous years, so it's definitely worth scavenging and doing any past papers you can find. best site for this is physicsandmathstutor.

maths and english are tough to cram for so start on these the soonest i would say. ensure your concepts in maths are clear- literally harass your teachers. i made the mistake of not to do this and went from a predicted 9 to a 7 in the real thing. also for maths the best thing for it is past paper after past paper. as for english, so long as you have a valid teacher, you should have been given all the resources necessary to learn from. quotations are not hard to revise. what i did for english lit (i got a 9 in the final thing) is try to predict possible questions for each of my plays/ poems/ novels. over half of the questions were ones that i had predicted and planned essays for, so i was over the moon in the exam.

i don't know what else you take, so can't give much more detailed advice. if you take creatives those are difficult- particularly art which is mostly coursework based. that is not something you can cram for unfortunately, and i think it's the same for music (and to a lesser extent, DT). i didn't take any creatives though, so i wouldn't know much about that.

also languages- start now. the tenses and what not- also the speakings are hell. i ended up with an 8 in french because the writing redeemed me, but the speaking definitely dragged my grade down, so if that's on your mock make sure you practise spontaneous answering.

in essence, don't stress because you have plenty of time to turn things around- but at the same time, start now rather than later if you want those 8s. i didn't do anything in year 10 (year 9 i basically irrelevant it's a two-year course) but practically locked myself in my house for the one month before exams and got 999998777 (taking into account i'm generally a bit slow to learn things).

good luck! don't sweat

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