Late revision fails when a student tries to cover the whole specification. Seven days is enough to secure what is nearly there and repair a small number of gaps. It is not enough to build a topic from nothing, so do not spend the week trying.
Triage on day one
- List every topic on the specification.
- Mark each: secure, shaky, or absent.
- Ignore 'absent' entirely unless it is worth a large share of the paper.
- Spend the week on 'shaky' — these are the recoverable marks.
- Keep 'secure' alive with short, frequent contact, not long sessions.
A day-by-day shape
| Day | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1 | Triage, plus one timed past paper section to get a baseline |
| 2 | Two shaky topics, worked to accuracy |
| 3 | Two more shaky topics |
| 4 | Full timed paper, marked strictly |
| 5 | Only the questions you lost marks on, plus recall drill |
| 6 | Mixed-topic questions, unlabelled, to practise selection |
| 7 | Light: formulas from blank, command words, calculator checks, early night |
Things not to do
- Do not re-read notes or watch videos passively — do questions.
- Do not start a topic you have never understood two days out.
- Do not do open-book past papers; they flatter you and teach nothing.
- Do not revise past the point where accuracy drops; tired practice embeds errors.
If you finish the week having done two timed papers, corrected every lost mark, and drilled your formulas daily, you will walk in with everything you actually have available to you — which is the whole aim of a last week.