The last week, and the exam itself

The last week

The temptation in the final days is to keep learning — there are gaps, they're visible, and time is short. Mostly this is a bad trade. New material learned in the last week is fragile, it competes with consolidating what you already have, and it usually displaces the practice that would have secured marks you can already nearly get.

The final week is for three things.

Retrieval on everything, quickly. Cycle through the whole syllabus at speed, testing rather than reading. You're not trying to deepen anything; you're keeping every topic within reach. A fast pass over ten topics beats a slow pass over three.

Timed sections. One or two full papers under real conditions, plus shorter timed sections on the question types you find slowest. This is rehearsal — you want the format to be boring by the time it counts. How to get the most out of them →

The failure list. Every question you've got wrong twice, in one place, reviewed daily. It's a small list and it's the highest-yield material you own.

The day before

Light retrieval in the morning, stop by mid-afternoon, and do something else. There's no evidence that the last four hours add anything, and there's decent evidence that sleep does — memory consolidation happens during it, and the cost of arriving tired is measurable in mistakes.

Practical things, done the night before rather than in the morning: equipment, the route, the time, the room. Not because they're difficult, but because a scramble in the morning starts the paper with your working memory already loaded.

The first five minutes

Almost everyone starts writing immediately. It feels like the safe move — the clock is running — and it's usually wrong. Five minutes spent on the whole paper first will earn more than five minutes of question one.

• Read the rubric. How many questions must you answer, from which sections, and is there a choice? People lose whole questions to this every year.
• Skim everything. You need to know what's coming, so you don't spend twenty minutes on a 4-marker while a 20-marker you could ace sits unread.
• Work out the pacing. Total minutes divided by total marks. Write the target finish time next to each question. This takes ninety seconds and prevents the commonest way of losing a grade.
• Note where you'll start. Beginning with a question you can definitely do is worth it — it gets writing started and settles the first few minutes.

Marks per minute

The rule that saves the most marks, and the hardest to obey: the value of a minute is highest on the question you haven't started yet.

Going from six marks to eight on a question you're deep in is expensive. Going from zero to five on an untouched question is cheap, because the first marks in any question are the easy ones. So when a question hits its time allocation, you leave it — even if you're nearly there, even if you're enjoying it. Come back if there's time at the end.

Corollary: never leave a question blank. A partial answer to a question you barely understand still picks up the definitional and set-up marks, and mark schemes hand those out generously.

Reading the question properly

A large share of lost marks are on questions people could have answered and answered slightly differently. Two habits, ten seconds each:

Underline the command word. Describe wants what happens; explain wants why; evaluate wants both sides and a judgement; compare wants explicit statements of similarity and difference, not two separate descriptions. Answering the wrong verb is the most expensive mechanical error there is.

Count the marks. The mark count is an instruction about length. Six marks means roughly six creditworthy points. Writing a page for two marks is time stolen from somewhere else; writing two lines for six is leaving marks in the paper.

When you go blank

It happens, and it's usually retrieval failure rather than a gap — the material is there and the route to it has closed, often because you're anxious. Fighting it head-on rarely works. What does:

• Move to another question and come back. The cue often arrives unbidden twenty minutes later.
• Write down anything adjacent — a related term, a diagram, the previous step. Memory is associative and one recovered fragment frequently drags the rest with it.
• Slow your breathing for thirty seconds. This is not a relaxation platitude: acute anxiety consumes the working memory you need, and reducing it makes retrieval measurably easier.

The last ten minutes

Reserve them, deliberately. In order of value: fill in anything left blank, however roughly; check units, signs and whether you answered the question that was asked; then re-read the long answers. Don't rewrite anything at this stage — second-guessing a complete answer under time pressure loses more marks than it gains.

After

Don't post-mortem it with other people between papers. It's reliably demoralising, it's frequently wrong, and it consumes attention you need for the next one. There'll be time afterwards.

If you take one thing

Write a target finish time next to every question before you start writing. Ninety seconds of arithmetic, and it defends against the single most common way that people who knew the material score below what they knew.