Most study advice stops at "revise more". The research points elsewhere: how you spend the hour matters more than how many hours you find. Students who reread and highlight feel better prepared than students who quiz themselves, and score worse.
The steps below follow Ali Abdaal's run through eight techniques from the book Make It Stick. They cover the what. This part covers the why, the mistakes that burn a whole revision week, and how to bend it to the exam you are sitting.
Why rereading and highlighting feel like studying
Rereading buys fluency. The page looks familiar, the words go down easily, and familiarity gets mistaken for knowledge. Then the exam asks you to produce the answer out of nothing.
Highlighting has the same flaw plus one of its own: it feels like a decision, so you stop making real ones. A chapter ends up three-quarters yellow and you have judged nothing. Close the book after a page you marked up and write the argument out. What comes back is what you know. The rest you were about to carry into the exam believing you knew.
What active recall looks like at a desk
Active recall is any moment where you pull something out of your head instead of pushing something in. It is small and constant, not a separate stage of revision:
- Close the book every two or three pages and say the argument out loud.
- Cover your notes, redraw the diagram from memory, then check it.
- Do past-paper questions before you feel ready, not after.
People fight that last one. Questions you will get wrong feel like wasted time, and they are the most efficient hour in the schedule: a wrong answer tells you which page to open next. If your notes are a wall of prose, a question column down the side - Cornell notes - turns them into a self-test with no extra work.
A spaced repetition schedule you can keep
Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how fast new material drains away: roughly half inside a day, most inside a week, unless something interrupts it. Spacing is the interruption.
A schedule that needs no software: review it the day you learn it, the next day, a week later, a month later. Four passes, each shorter than the last, since you are only repairing what fell out. Anki automates the intervals; a repeating calendar entry does the same job for one module. The app was never the mechanism. The gap between reviews is.
Your desk, your phone, and how long a session runs
Phone in another room. Face down on the desk still costs you: part of your attention stays on call.
Run 40 to 50 minutes, then stop for 10. Stop while you still have something left rather than grinding until attention breaks. Get close to exam conditions where you can: quiet, nothing with lyrics, no second screen. Recall trained with a podcast running is recall you cannot repeat in a silent hall. Studying at the same time each day kills the daily argument about starting, which is what the Atomic Habits approach is for.
Match the practice to the exam, and to the night before
Different papers reward different drills.
- Multiple choice turns on fine distinctions. Practise saying why the other three options are wrong, not just why yours is right.
- Essay papers turn on structure. Write six or eight ten-minute plans instead of one full essay.
- Problem sets turn on spotting which method applies. Redo old problems with the numbers changed, and mix topics so you have to choose. Mixing is the part everyone skips.
The night before, stop early. A fast pass across the whole syllabus beats a deep pass over one topic: you are checking what is loose, not learning. Sleep does the consolidation and it cannot be crammed. In the morning, eat, reread nothing, warm up with three or four questions, and go. Next term gets cheaper if this one leaves a usable record, which is the argument for learning how to take notes properly.
