The fun, laughter and warmth of the winter holidays may seem like a distant memory now that the exam season is upon us. And coming back to reality can be a hard pill to swallow, but it doesn’t have to be that way. With the right exam revision schedule, you can get a firm grip of your workload and #boss those exams!
The What, the Where, the When
The first port of call when getting your shit together is finding out what exams you have, where they will take place and exactly how much time you have left between reading this blog post and doing the deed. You want to get real about what little of a timescale you have left to play around with. I start with a blank word document, usually entitled something fun like “What I Need to Do to Graduate.docx”, and block bold all the classes, assignments & exam requirements I have.
The Guts of It
Right, now that we have the skeletal form of your budding exam revision schedule, we need to flesh it out. To do that, we have to check out those old class syllabi you probably haven’t opened since the beginning of semester. It’s the fastest way to find out what you need to know for the upcoming exam, and you are gonna want to do that. Basically, the idea is to word-vomit your entire course load onto here. You want to end up with a full to-do list of everything you need to know to smash this.
Do the Crime, and the Time
A snippet of my exam revision schedule of Summer 2018.
The next stage in learning how to effectively plan your exam season is all about time management. I know there are many of you in a love-hate relationship with time and procrastination can be a real buzz kill. But it’s vital that you get to grips with how long it takes you to complete certain tasks. For example, depending on the length of the article I have to read, I can assign a generic hour-based time slot on how long I think it will take me – a typical 2-column article of 20 pages is approx. 2 hours.
Assign time slots for each and every task that you have written down for each exam. I know it can seem daunting, but really it’s just a lot of copy and paste once you get the gist of it. If you need some help with time management at uni in general, check out my other blog post here.
Schedule Me Like One of Your Little French Girls
Time to get down and do the dirty. Whether you prefer Google Calendar, post-it notes, or a classic Moleskine (yes, I am in love with mine), you need to plan out each hour that you have just assigned to those oh-so-important exam-passing tasks. Choose your planner of choice, and make it fun! I’m a sucker for pretty stationary and colour-coded tasks. So whatever your fancy is, go with that. Just get it done.
Adulting As Usual
It can be really hard to get your work-life balance in check – especially when you have sold your soul to a revision schedule of doom. But I wouldn’t be able to put this post out without the disclaimer that life still goes on, you still need fresh laundry and that food isn’t going to cook itself. The critical everyday tasks that make you tick also need to go into your revision schedule for the upcoming weeks. It will honestly make it that bit more bearable to live through when you come home from your last exam and your bed isn’t covered in pot noodle cups. Take some time to sort yourself out, and the productivity will follow.
So that’s it! My tried and tested method of planning out my exam revision schedules. It doesn’t matter how late you do this in the semester (although sooner rather than later will save you some grey hairs), it’s a surefire way to give yourself a grip on everything that needs to be done. Keep calm and carry on. And good luck!
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