Revision Tips – Post 2
Student experience 8 January 2021
Following on from the last post, find out how one of our PASS Leaders, Tyler, prepares for his exams with these revision tips and techniques.
When it comes to efficient and effective revision, I and other popular revision studies and books, such as “make it stick” by Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel, and Peter C Brown, suggest that good revision can be distilled to two main revision techniques. These two techniques are active recall and spaced repetition.
Revision phase
When revising there are a couple techniques that heavily implement spaced repetition and active recall that I find extremely useful and credit to helping me understand content and memorise it well.
Past papers and questions
Everyone uses past papers for a reason, they are an amazing active recall tool. They allow you to apply yourself to problems you have never seen before and they also give you a rough idea of where your understanding of topics is. As well as all this, past papers are great at highlighting your strengths and weaknesses and can help you strategize which topics to revise more and which topics you are fairly comfortable with.
One nuance I have when doing past papers is that I prefer to do one section of questions at a time before checking my answers if possible. As I believe this allows me to remember more accurately how I was thinking at the time of trying a question so that if I had gotten it wrong, I may understand slightly better where I went wrong.
I find this technique especially helpful when not doing questions in timed conditions and split the past paper over two days, as if I do the past paper in whole before checking the solutions, I may not understand what I was thinking in the section I did the previous day. All of this can be applied not only to past papers but workshop questions as well.
Question banks
The next technique is my personal favourite, and I very rarely see people using it. I like to call this technique “question banks”. Question banks combine techniques of active recall and spaced repetition together which makes them fantastic revision tools. As well as this, question banks are extremely portable and can even be used on a bus or train for some quick revision on the go.
In order to use a question bank, you first have to make one. This can take roughly twenty minutes to an hour depending on how many questions you make and that may sound quite arduous, however I believe this follows the 80/20 rule (also known as the pareto principle). Which maintains that 80% of the output or ‘profit’ can be achieved from only inputting 20% of the work needed and any further work will only yield a marginal return on investment of your precious time. This is all to say that the making of the question bank will actually help you learn most of the content, as you have to apply yourself when making the questions and answers and this allows you to passively learn the information as well, so I believe the process is more than worth it.
How does one make a question bank?
To make a question bank you will need a spreadsheet software either excel or google sheets. I personally much prefer google sheets as it is online, saves automatically and also syncs directly to the app which I keep on my phone so I may revise from it anywhere I am. Next you must comb through your consolidated notes and at each point of information ask yourself firstly if you need to make it into a question, for example if you are sure you will remember the information, or it is provided in the exam for you (such as some constants or equations) there is no point in making a question from it.
How can I rearrange this info into a short question and answer?
You should choose the most suitable short way to phrase the question and answer. In the first column you should put the list of questions you have made and in the second column you should put the corresponding answers. The last step to setting up a question bank is to change all the answers to white text so they’re not initially visible however when you hover over the answer box the answer will be displayed in the formula bar. This allows you to go through the questions one by one memorising all the key information in the course and this is the active recall aspect of question banks.
Now comes the spaced repetition part of the question bank. I try to go through all my question banks once per day leading up to exams which may sound like way too much work however, I use a traffic light system where after each question I will ‘grade’ my ability to answer the question. Green is a correct answer, orange is semi-correct, and red is incorrect. According to this system I will fill the colour of question box either green, orange or red depending on how I performed.
This is how I go about the spaced repetition. My ‘green’ answers I will only go over roughly once every week, since I understand the question fairly well. My ‘orange’ answer I will only go over roughly every two days, since it is likely I will remember the correct answer after one day and finally my ‘red’ answers I will go over every day. When I get a previously ‘green’ question wrong I will change it to red and visa versa. This system implements spaced repetition as well as lowering the daily workload of question banks to go through.
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