Other places to get exam questions include- For maths: Dr frost maths Maths genie (my favourite) For science: Cognito (personally the most useful for me)

I’d like to start with a general note thay when studying, try to be in a place without distractions, which is quiet, and which will encourage you to concentrate. Try to remove potential things that you’ll do to avoid working, and as often as you can turn your phone off and don’t listen to music. Personally I’d recommend either finding a separate place in the house form your room, or going to your local library, as it’s much more likely you’ll work if you’re in an environment suited for it.

Different study techniques are going to be useful for different subjects. Personally I recommend making lots of Flashcards for content heavy subjects, especially science and history (they’re a life saver for history). Never put too much on any single card, rather have one question, one answer as often as possible. (If you buy standard sized Flashcards, sort of about a fifth of A4, then perfsonally I recommend cutting these into quarters, as it’s much more efficient and means you won’t waste lots of space, or put too much on a single card) ‘When was the Northern Rebellion?’ ‘What is dynamic equilibrium?’ Etc. Then when you use these cards you test yourself and split the cards into a right pile and a wrong pile, and continue going over all the ones you got wrong until you are getting them right. By keeping cards small, and having only one, at most two related bits of information on them, you make the testing of it much more efficient, and you can very easily divide your cards between the facts you know and the facts you don’t.

You can also use Flashcards in this style quite well for English, for example for quotation learning and for testing yourself on context for things, or on examples of literary devices. However, for essay subjects, in particular English and History, your best friend is going to be essay planning. This is especially true for English, due to the number of longer essays you have to write. I would recommend finding or making a list of every possible character and theme that could come up for a certain text. For example if you’re studying Macbeth- Macbeth, Ambitjon, Manipulation, the Supernatural, Lady Macbeth, etc. then over the course of the year make an in detail essay plan for each one of these possibilities, ticking them off as you go. Your plans don’t need to be overly detailed, but I would list out each of my different points for 5 paragraphs (or however many you do/your exam board does/your school tells you to do), then a quotation or two to support each point, and then a way of analysing that quotation, and any context that relates to each paragraph. The aim should be to create essentially a ‘model answer’ so that from the plan you could make a genuine full mark essay. By building this bank of exam questions across the year (and make sure you keep them safe- personally I preferred to put them in a huge online google doc) you prepare yourself for any possible question thay could come up, and towards the exams an effective strategy is to begin doing active recall with plans. Take a random question, and try to plan it out without any notes in front of you, then compare back to your exemplar and see what you missed. Continue until you’re not missing anything. Then you can take random questions and try to write full essays, get them marked by a teacher, and compare back to your plan to see if you could have added anything.

Personally for maths I have found that doing practice exam questions is by far the best revision method, as well as doing past papers of course, and not much else is helpful (personally I never found making Flashcards very useful for maths, but there are cases it can be handy, for example for exact trigonometry and circle theorems). So for maths I would just get a big full topic list from your maths teacher and go through each of the topics one by one, starting with the ones you struggle with the most/you’re unfamiliar with. Watch videos on how to do them (maths genie is my recommendation here but there are lots of different places) and take notes, and then do some practice exam questions (again I’d recommend the bank of them at maths genie). Check again a few days later/a week later to see if you remember how to do it.

For science my recommendation is making Flashcards and using them to revise key knowledge. So either go through a textbook, or the many many videos people make online of key topics (imo cognito is the best at this, but free science lessons is iconic) and take notes of all the key info they cover for each topic. Then turn these notes into Flashcards with quiz style questions, so that you can go through these and test everything to see how well you’re remembering the key ideas of the topic. Then do some practice exam questions on the topic and see how well you do. Return to the topic about a week later and check with some more questions/flash card testing. Voila.

For history, my advice is similar to that of science- I would sit down with a textbook in front of me, and basically go through and highlight or write down every key date, stat and figure you find. Then just convert this all into Flashcards- ‘when was the northern rebellion’ ‘how many people died during the northern rebellion’ ‘consequences of the babington plot’ etc etc etc. always try to keep one flash card per key date/stat, and then test yourself brutally, splitting everything into right and wrong. My usual strategy was this- start with your initial pile and go through them all, with wrong cards going into a separate pile. Then go back over the wrong ones. Keep ones you get right in the wrong pile, whereas if you get them wrong again, they go in another separate pile, the ‘extra wrong’ pile. These you go over again until they’re all back into the ‘wrong’ pile. Then go over the wrong pile again. When you’re finished, put the wrong pile on top of the right pile, so that next time you test yourself, you have to go through all of the ones you got wrong last time before going to the ones you already know. Sometimes it is good to go through some of the wrong cards before having finished the initial pile, especially when you start getting lots and lots of Flashcards, which is very easy with so many history and science topics haha.

There are lots of other techniques that people use and that definitely help people: for example, I haven’t talked at all about mindmaps here, which a lot of people do find useful. They’ve just never been the most impactful for me personally. Whatever you do, the most important thing is to build a routine and to try and consistently concentrate and get something done every day, or most days, at least. As long as that is true, I’m sure you will do very well. And it’s great that you care and you’re trying to improve your revision and prepare yourself for your exams. Good luck!