How to study for an exam in two weeks

Write down every topic that can appear, and next to each one mark whether you could explain it to someone right now. You will usually find three groups: solid, shaky, and never really learned. The shaky group is where most of your marks are hiding, because the solid group is already done and the third group is expensive.

Work through the shaky topics with the source material open. Make a learning deck per topic so you have a short summary with a few highlights on each card. The goal here is not memory, it is making sure nothing is confusing. A fact you do not understand will not stick no matter how many times you review it.

Keep sessions to 45 minutes with a real break. Two clear sessions beat four foggy ones.

Now switch to quiz decks and answer before you look. Cover roughly two topics a day and re-run yesterday's deck first, so every topic comes back at least twice with a gap in between. Track which decks you score badly on and bring those back sooner.

Resist the urge to keep making new material at this stage. Making cards feels productive and is not the same as learning them.

More on the schedule: spaced repetition explained.

Move to exam decks and run them timed. Timed practice trains two things that recall drills do not: pacing and reading questions properly under pressure. Do one full timed run per day, then spend twice as long reviewing what you got wrong as you spent taking it.

When you are still shaky on a topic, use practice mode instead. The answer appears after each question and the result stays out of your score history, so you can work through a weak area without polluting the record you are using to judge readiness.

See exam prep flashcards.

The day before, review the cards you have missed most often and nothing else. No new topics, no full mock exam. Sleep is worth more marks at this point than another two hours of revision, and cramming late tends to shake your confidence on things you already knew.

Compress, do not skip. With one week, spend two days understanding, three drilling, one on timed practice, one light. With three days, go straight to quiz decks on the highest-weight topics and accept that you are optimising for marks, not coverage.

Whatever the timeline, the order stays the same: understand, recall, simulate. Starting with mock exams before you understand the material just tells you what you already know, which is that you are not ready.