When to start revising Preparing for revision

Roger's advice on how to prepare for exams

Roger: A tutor once told me there were only two things I needed to know to do well in an exam - focus and preparation. She avoided the word 'revision', and talked about ‘preparing’. And the other key words were that it was ‘some’ preparation, not getting things out of proportion, and not going overboard. And it needed to be focussed. I think that's … the secret that I've learnt is that that's about effectiveness and efficiency over the years.

The trick of using the word 'preparing', or ‘preparation’, helped me a lot because recollections of revision go back to school days. And, let's say that maybe I wasn't particularly good at that. But I found preparing for an exam something much easier to do. And that took me away from a former mindset of having to revise.

The second part of the model comes back to the exam itself, and it's about technique, which again can be rehearsed and practised.

I've shared many times with other students, when are we going to start revising? And I guess the answer is, start now. A tutor … in fact several tutors have all have said to me, “it's never too late and it's never too early”. I think the thing to avoid is over-preparation. So start when it’s right for you. But, if you save it up the end - and some people are, I suspect like that - it actually does place you under pressure. You may not be able to start straightaway, but start sooner, rather than later, and give yourself more time.

If you're at an early point in your studies, preparing for an exam may take some practise, so it's better to cut yourself some slack up front, so that you can develop your own style and methods of preparation. If you save it up till the end, then you're going to have to lay the track and run along at the same time. So it's never too late, but equally, it's never too early.

I think the first step is understand what's required in the exam. Obviously, we need to know practical things like when it is, where it is, how long is the paper and what is it looking for … how it's structured.

I've worked in the past on something called the Specimen Exam Paper, and what the OU, I think, abbreviates to the acronym SEP. Get to know and love your SEP. Look at it early. It may be scary in the first instance, but it will be your best guide to the format and structure of the exam. And to do well, you need to know how a particular paper will be structured, how it will be presented, and what I call ‘the rules’ are.

Tutors will talk about the exam rubric. This simply means how many questions you're allowed to answer in each section, and whether you have a choice, and things like this … and how many marks are available. It's important to understand that rubric to maximise your marks. If you make a mistake in interpreting a rubric, you will lose marks because a script marker cannot award marks if you've broken the rubric. If you've answered two questions from Section A, and you were only meant to answer one, they will only give you marks for your best answer. The time spent on that second answer will be wasted, and you will have lost marks.