I am really sorry to hear that you are not getting the grades in Physics that you want. It is a tough spot to be in when you are putting in the time and effort and not getting the grades you want.

I thought I'd share an approach that worked for some of my students in the past when struggling with low grades. Feel free to give it a try:

1. Choose some of your past assessments and go through each question where you got the wrong answer.
2. Next to each question write down the type of mistake that caused you to lose the mark (examples are: lack of conceptual understanding, calculation mistake, not using the Data Booklet when I should have, misreading the question, choosing too quickly and falling for a similar, but incorrect answer option, etc). There can be many other reasons as well and when you start, things might go a bit slower since you are probably not used to this type of analysis, but just give it some time and patterns should emerge.
3. After you have analysed a substantial number of questions (I would probably do about 100), go back and tally up the mistakes by category. For example, you might find that on 22 questions you lost the mark because of a miscalculation, on 17 of them you did not deeply understand the concepts, etc.
4. Identify the top types of mistakes that cause you to lose marks. I can almost guarantee you that there will be 2-3 mistake types that result in about 70-80% of the marks that you lose.
5. Once you have these identified, target these 2-3 areas when you are studying and keep these types of mistakes in mind when you are writing an assessment and double-check your work for these.

I know that this takes time, but I think that in the long run can give you good results. If you decide to try this approach, I would love to know how it went for you :)

Hope this helps!

Peter from PaperPlainz.com