How to study for an exam in two weeks
Two weeks is enough for most exams if you spend them in the right order: understand the material, then drill recall, then practise under exam conditions. Doing those three in the wrong order is why revision often runs out of time.
BEFORE YOU START: MAP THE EXAM
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 barely 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.
DAYS 1 TO 4: UNDERSTAND
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 clarity first; memory comes later. A misunderstood fact slips away no matter how many times you review it.
Keep sessions to 45 minutes with a real break. Two clear sessions beat four foggy ones.
DAYS 5 TO 10: DRILL RECALL
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, but learning them is a separate job.
More on the schedule: spaced repetition explained.
DAYS 11 TO 13: EXAM CONDITIONS
Move to exam decks and run them timed. Timed practice trains two things that recall drills miss: 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.
DAY 14: LIGHT REVIEW ONLY
The day before, review the cards you have missed most often and nothing else. Skip new topics and full mock exams. 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.
IF YOU HAVE LESS THAN TWO WEEKS
Compress rather than 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 over coverage.
Whatever the timeline, the order stays the same: understand, recall, simulate. Starting with mock exams before you understand the material only confirms what you already suspected: there are gaps to close first.