Deckloop Blog
I revised for exams the way a lot of students do: stress, rereading, cramming, and hoping for the best. Looking back, I’d ditch the chaos and use a much better system built around recall, questions, spacing, and exposing weak points early.
My exam prep used to be complete chaos.
Not the cool kind. Not the cinematic, laid back, laissez faire, "it will all turn out ok but let’s add a little drama" kind. I mean actual chaos. Weird bursts of caffeine-riddled panic. Momentary glimpses of overconfidence. A desk strewn full of scribbled papers. A timetable of exam dates looking over me like a doomsday clock. All-nighters of "revision" followed by the deeply unsettling feeling that I still knew absolutely nothing and may actually fall asleep in the exam hall.
At the time, I thought that was normal. In a way, it was. A lot of people revise like that. You sit there for long enough, suffer visibly enough, and hope that somehow the information seeps into your brain through sheer will and fear.
Sometimes it sort of works. That’s the annoying part.
You can absolutely drag yourself through exams on stress, caffeine, and sheer force of will. Plenty of people do. I did. But looking back, I made the whole thing far harder than it needed to be, because I was doing loads of things that looked like studying and felt like studying without actually being the best way to remember anything at all.
That was the real problem.
I thought revision was about spending time with the material.
What I should have realised much earlier is that revision is about being able to drag the material back out of your head when it counts.
Those are not the same thing.
So if I had to do my exams all over again, I would not try to become one of those perfect, serene students with a planner, matching pens, and the emotional stability of a Swiss watch. That was never going to be me.
But I would try to force myself to follow a system with a little more lead time than the night before the exam.
My original revision strategy, if you could call it that, was basically this:
This is the trap, really. A lot of bad revision feels weirdly productive because it gives you contact with the material. You recognise the page. You recognise the key terms. You think, yeah, yeah, I know this. I’ve seen this before.
But seeing something before is not the same as being able to recall it under pressure.
That was where the wheels came off.
With the notes open, everything felt familiar. With the notes shut, it turned out my memory was held together with string and optimism.
So the biggest thing I’d change is simple: I would stop treating revision like exposure and start treating it like retrieval.
Not "have I looked at this enough?"
More "can I actually produce it?"
That one change fixes a lot.
If I were starting a topic now, I wouldn’t begin by trying to make the world’s prettiest summary. I’d get the rough shape of it first.
Basically: get the lay of the land.
But that bit should be short.
Because the mistake is staying there too long. A lot of students live in the "going over it" phase for far too long because it feels safe. It feels like progress. It feels like you’re working. But it’s also very comfortable, and comfortable revision lies to you.
So yes, get the map.
Then stop cuddling the notes and shut the bloody textbook.
This is where proper revision starts.
You close the book, move the notes away, and ask yourself: right then, what have I actually got?
This is the bit I wish I’d done years earlier.
Because it feels more effortful. Which is exactly why it works.
When you do this, you find out very quickly whether you know something or whether you’ve just spent forty minutes nodding along to words on a page. And yes, that can be humbling. You think you know a topic, then the second you shut the notes your brain produces one half-remembered keyword and a child’s doodle of a diagram with the labels all wrong.
Excellent. That is useful.
That awful "oh shit, I don’t actually know this" moment is not the revision session going badly. That is the revision session working. Assuming you’re revising and not procrastinating again. Oooh, TikTok...
This is the real process.
Look at the material.
Shut it.
Try to recall it.
Find the holes.
Patch the holes.
Try again.
That’s it.
That’s the engine.
The old version of me used to treat gaps in memory as a foretelling of doom. I’d blank on something and immediately curse myself and my idiocy. In reality, it just meant I’d found the weak point.
That is incredibly valuable.
You do not want your weak points hiding quietly until exam day. You want them dragged into the light early, while there is still time to deal with them. Better to discover on a Wednesday night that you’ve mangled an entire process than discover it in a fluorescent sports hall while your heart is beating at 150 bpm sitting still and your palms are sweaty.
So now I’d be far more aggressive about exposing weakness.
Not because it feels nice. It doesn’t.
Because it’s efficient.
Another thing I got badly wrong: I was far too fond of the heroic revision binge.
You know the sort of thing. Big session. "I’m pulling an all-nighter if I have to." "Today I am finally sorting this out!" Hours at the desk. Slowly deteriorating posture. A desperate sense that sheer effort must count for something.
Again, there is a reason people do this. It feels serious. It feels sacrificial. Some of us are secretly adrenaline and cortisol junkies. It feels like real work in the biblical sense of the word. You are suffering visibly, therefore something worthwhile must be happening.
Not necessarily.
The problem with hammering one topic for hours is that by the end of it, you can create this fake sense of mastery. Everything feels smooth because you’ve been bathing in the same material for half the day. Of course it feels familiar. You’ve basically wallpapered your brain with it.
Then a few days pass, and half of it evaporates.
So if I had to do it again, I’d revise in shorter loops and come back to things later, when they’d gone a bit fuzzy.
That’s the part most people get wrong. When something starts to slip, they think that means they’re losing it. But a bit of forgetting is actually useful, because having to pull something back when it isn’t perfectly fresh forces your memory to do some real work.
So instead of one six-hour death march on a Sunday, I’d rather do:
Less dramatic. Much better.
Old me liked neat boxes.
Finish this topic. Then move on. Do twenty of the same type of problem until it starts to feel smooth. There is something emotionally satisfying about that. You get the lovely illusion of completion.
The problem is that exams are rude.
They don’t ask, "Would you now like a nice clean set of questions on the exact thing you’ve just revised for two hours?"
No. They mix things. They jump around. They force you to work out what kind of question this is, what topic it belongs to, what method you need, and whether you can switch gears without falling apart.
So now I’d mix topics much earlier.
Not randomly, but deliberately.
A bit of one thing. Then another. Then back again. Older topics mixed into newer ones. Different problem types in the same session. Questions that force you to tell similar ideas apart instead of admiring them one by one in isolation.
This feels worse at first because you stop getting that easy little rhythm. Good. That easy rhythm was probably giving you a false sense of security.
Revision that flatters you is dangerous.
I wasted too much time waiting until I felt confident.
That sounds sensible, but it’s backwards.
You should be attempting questions before you feel fully ready. You should be trying to explain things before you think you’ve polished them. You should be making a few mistakes while the stakes are still low.
Because that is how you find out what the problem is.
A lot of students want to avoid questions until they’ve "covered everything". The issue is that "covered everything" often means "looked at loads of material without checking whether any of it would survive contact with reality".
So now I’d go earlier.
That is a much more productive loop than sitting there rereading until you feel academically saturated.
This is one of the best tests there is.
If not, there is a decent chance you don’t really know it yet.
That doesn’t mean you need to sound simplistic. It just means you should be able to say what the thing is doing, why it matters, and how it works without quoting the source material verbatim like a parrot.
A lot of fake confidence comes from recognising official wording. Real confidence is being able to produce the idea yourself.
This might be the biggest adjustment to our default mindset.
I used to treat mistakes as evidence that revision was failing.
Now I think mistakes are part of the machinery.
You attempt something.
You mess it up.
You check it.
You correct it.
You do it again later.
That is not a breakdown in the process. That is the process.
The goal is not to glide through revision feeling clever. The goal is to expose weakness, correct it, and come back stronger later. That means your ego is going to take a few hits. Fine. Your ego does not sit the exam. You do.
Better to get slapped around a bit by a past-paper question when it doesn’t count than have to live with a poor grade on your academic record forever.
If I were doing exams again, I’d stop:
My revision system now would be dead simple:
Repeat until recall starts to become normal instead of miraculous.
That’s the system.
Not pretty. Not spiritual. Not especially fun.
But it’s honest.
And that, I think, is the difference.
My exam prep was chaos with no structure. Just cortisol-fuelled stress, boring repetition, and the unavoidable last-minute cram.
If I had to do it again, I would use this system, start with enough lead time to go through learning phases, spend a little time more often rather than cramming and doing mental Ironmans, then cruise into those top marks without breaking a sweat.
If you want a tool to support that kind of loop, compare the main options in The Best Flashcard Apps in 2026 or check current Deckloop pricing.
