Every uni blogger has an opinion on the best way to revise. Every uni blogger thinks they have the answer to all your exam woes. But the truth is, no student can tell another student how to revise. We just have to work out a unique method that suits us ourselves. Today I want to share exactly how I revise for my history exams, in the hope that you may pick up a method that might work for you, or rule out the techniques that don't.
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| Colourful, novelty stationery makes revision days a little bit better... |
Gathering my stationery and writing a to do list is the first task for my revision session. I take about 5 minutes to write out everything I need to achieve during my allotted time frame, making sure I don't miss anything important.
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| Spending time going over information and transferring it succinctly into spider diagrams works perfectly for me. |
History exams at my uni tend to require students to answer two essay questions in two hours. Every topic is 99% guaranteed to come up in the exam, so we are advised to revise three topics fully and one topic partially for each exam.
Under these exam circumstances my revision tends to go like this:
1. Listen to/watch lecture recordings and summarise lecture topic in a A3 diagram.
2. Read/re-read and make notes on key seminar readings for each topic.
3. Re-read and make notes on any readings I have done for any coursework essays I chose to write on this topic.
4. Plan seminar questions and essay questions provided in the module handbook, in order to pull together all the information I have learnt. I do this in spider diagram form too. These plans then form the basis of my revision.
5. Highlight these plans until EVERYTHING is colourful (see picture above).
6. Repeat process for however many topics I need to revise, whilst also taking 30 mins out of each day (morning and night) to re-read and memorise existing planning sheets.
7. By the day of the exam, I have memorised each diagram, and am able to apply my knowledge to any essay question about any of the three topics.
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| An example of a finished lecture spider diagram |
I hope this has helped one of you guys reading this. I remember being quite daunted as a fresher, as there was very little guidance from the university on how to revise as they assumed we already knew. Please do let me know if any of this method works for you, whether you be a fresher or a panicked 2nd/3rd year!
Good luck! Summer break is nearly here!
Beth x
