Prepare | Revise | Achieve: making the most of revision time

Hilary Sayer

Written with the assistance of our IB Prepared series authors

After planning your time, it can be difficult to know where to start your revision. Our IB Prepared authors share three areas of focus to help you make the most of your time. This is the second post in our Prepare | Revise | Achieve series.

Find the linking ideas

After you’ve planned your revision schedule, it’s important to ensure you make the most of the time you have. David Homer, author of IB Prepared Physics, suggests that starting to think about revision during the latter parts of your course will help you to find the linking ideas and connections in the course. Then you can add these to your revision notes when they appear. This will help you to consolidate your learning from the course as a whole. For physics, these ideas might include conservation of energy, momentum, exponential change, and so on.

Use past paper questions

Ed Kemp, author of IB Prepared Mathematics Analysis and Approaches, notes that “most students already know the importance of doing past papers, but there are a limited number.” To make the most out of these, you can highlight important data, facts, and words as you read the question. Speak to your teacher about common mistakes students make when answering exam questions, so when you review your answer you can avoid them.

David Harris, author of IB Prepared Mathematics Applications and Interpretations, suggests that you also use this time to practice your exam technique. “Set a timer for five minutes and read the past paper. Form your strategy: what questions will you do first? Can you do any of the questions in your head before the end of the five minutes?” Peter Gray, author of IB Prepared Mathematics Applications and Interpretations, knows that this is “possibly the most important five minutes in a Mathematics exam”. He advises you can use this time to identify questions you might be more familiar with, and you can “increase confidence for the paper by picking up some quick marks”.

Develop your writing skills

Anna Androulaki, author of IB Prepared English A: Literature, says that “regular writing practice can help the development of your writing skills”, which is important for every assessment. For long answer questions, for example in English A, you should be looking to:

  • state the idea or argument you are going to support clearly
  • introduce your evidence for this idea
  • integrate the evidence in your writing
  • interpret the evidence
  • discuss the implication of the evidence for the argument

The third post in this series, Prepare | Revise | Achieve: maximise your potential during the assessment period, will be live the first week of April

IB Prepared

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