Introduction

This article includes:

• Short-term revision method
• My personal experience
• Online resource

Scenarios suitable for applying this article’s method:

• Exam preparation, namely, to improve grades, but not to better your grasp of knowledge
• Tight schedule (within about a month before the exam?)
• Plenty of free time

My Experience

0. “Cramming” and I: Some Unimportant Words?

I’m a procrastinator, so for many exams, even though I had time to prepare, I still ended up doing short-term preparation, aka cramming. Some examples include my IELTS exam, a math competition (which I don’t want to name here), and almost every History mock exam. But my grades were acceptable, at least much better than if I didn’t revise at all.

For many exams, even if I got prepared to some extent, when I came to the moment right before the exam, I still revised intensively. For example, I did that for almost all the mock exams (especially the chemistry ones) during these two years in IB DP. Also, I think cramming was actually helpful for me.

In short, I cram a lot, and the process has been painful. I often regret that I didn’t use my everyday learning to avoid this pain of cramming. However, every single time, I felt extremely lucky and thankful of myself for really devoting my time to cramming.

We always say: Don’t cram. I think that makes sense, because we want to form the good habit of learning bits by bits and building up our knowledge gradually, and in this way the knowledge is surely more complete and more longstanding. Cramming is in sharp contrast with this. But, I also think that’s not to shame us for cramming when we have no other solution. As I see it, cramming shouldn’t be something so unforgivable. It should be a neutral term; it should only be a temporary solution to our problems—it lets us secure our grades first, and then we can really catch up with the knowledge. As long as grades are an important measurement of our academic performance, I guess, for us who are in endless competitions, cramming will still be a need.

I also understand that, the need to cram sometimes does not mean that we’re always going to rely on cramming in our revision. When we cram, there isn’t any extra time for us to use as a backup, so we need our revision plan to go without any disruptions, which I think is highly risky in itself. After all, to stress it again, I think of cramming only as a temporary solution to our problems. I believe that efficient and effective studying is necessarily based on sufficient studying time and good everyday habits.

1. Mentally Prepare Yourself

I tell myself: There’s time left. Why don’t I use that to revise?

I think the most important thing is to acknowledge the current reality and stay rational. The time before the exam will only get shorter, so we should try hard to spend every single second on revision, not on being anxious. Another reason for us to calm down is that, only when we have a clear mind, our efficiency can improve. Don’t blame yourself too much or have too much stress and anxiety. Of course, don’t let things go and give up on yourself, either. Keep a stable state of mind.

Next, we need to know what we should do, so that we can make a plan.

2. Sacrifice Some Content

I tell myself: I’m already at this stage, so I must sacrifice things.

Closely study the exam requirements, look at the past papers, and after you get some understanding of them, skip the unnecessary content for your revision, but make sure that you can still gain marks.

For example, in the month before my IB DP Finals, I started to get more and more free time, and at the same time, I needed to revise for History¹. Luckily, meanwhile, because of COVID, the content of History paper 2 for the M21 exam session is reduced from writing two essays from different topics to writing only one essay. That means, although we learned two topics, we didn’t necessarily need to revise both of them.

At this point, I needed to know clearly: Which topic should I revise? Which case studies for this topic should I revise? Every topic has three sub-topics. Should I revise all three of them, or should I make a choice?

Originally, I wanted to revise all of them: both topics, all sub-topics, all the case studies. But soon I realized that my time was too little for the large amount of content, so I had to give up on a lot of content and take some risks. In the end, I weighed up the different choices like below and made my decision.

In this way, I sacrificed a lot of knowledge content to make up for the depth of my revision, while making sure that at least one question on paper 2 would be from the ones that I prepared for.

If the exam is held regularly and consecutively, then we can definitely find, more or less, some patterns in the exam questions. We should also make use of these patterns, although we can’t rely on them too much. For example, the exam questions of IB DP History rarely repeat, so I studied the past paper questions carefully and found out that some key points, such as foreign policy, weren’t tested yet under the current syllabus. So when I revised for other key points, I also put emphasis on these things. Surprisingly, in the exam, there was actually a question specifically on foreign policy.

3. Know the Form

I tell myself: If I can do work before the exam to save time during it, even if I only save a minute, that’s still my gain.

Familiarize yourself with the form of your exam materials, such as exam paper(s), data/formula booklet, and calculator:

• Layout & Formatting
• Font type, font size, paper size
• Location of key info, such as description of content on exam papers, key words in questions, key formulas in formula booklets.
• Numbering: Page number of exam papers, numbering of sources (if applicable), question numbers, etc.
• Meaning of letters in formula booklets
• Calculator functions:
  • Copy & paste
  • To enter an often-used value quickly, define it as $x$ or any letter.
  • Order of variables in the normal distribution function
  • etc.

All of these are what you need to “cram”. Familiarizing yourself with the exam materials is also part of exam preparation. Only when we know the exam environment, we can relax more when we apply our knowledge and save the time we might spend on familiarizing with the paper and looking for information on the spot.

For example, before my exam, I dedicated time to familiarize myself with DP History paper 1, which I think was really worth it. During that time, I realized that on paper 1, under the heading of each prescribed subject, there was a description of the content covered in that specific exam. So I knew that I must look at that first to avoid going off topic later in my answers to the questions. I also found out that some questions, such as the OPVL questions, always have the same beginning. Only the second half of the question is the specific requirements for this time. So during the exam, I could go directly for the second half.

4. Plan Your Revision

I tell myself: If I don’t do the most important things first, am I waiting to run out of time so I have to simply give up?

Use your time effectively.

Prioritize:

• The hardest & the most important content
• The best revision resources & the newest past papers (or IB specimen/example papers)

It’s not necessary to do a lot of papers now. Doing one or two sets of the most valuable (usually the newest) exam papers completely should suffice. For the rest, simply read each question, annotate it, think, have an answer in your mind, and then look at the mark scheme. Save your time for writing.

For example, I did this in the morning before my DP Physics exam. I read each question directly, came up with a direction or a method, and if it’s in the mark scheme, then I could skip this question. Only if I couldn’t come up with a direction to work in or if my method was different from the syllabus, then I worked on the question carefully.

If you need to practice time management during the actual exam, especially for essay-writing questions, then I recommend you plan to do past papers or similarly styled mock papers at a later stage of your revision, under exam conditions. At this later stage, your’ve already mastered the majority of content, so now you can just focus on application of knowledge and the more practical things, such as how much time you need to spend on each essay paragraph.

For example, I only completed a hand-written paper-2 essay at the night before my History exam, not any earlier during my revision. In this way, I could apply the knowledge I revised when I wrote by hand and that really have me a sense of achievement and boosted my confidence. I think this positive mindset was very helpful for me who had been in a “cramming mode”.

I tell myself: During these days of exam preparation, I’m just a emotionless problem-solving machine.

Only when there’s a plan, we can complete our work in an organized manner. But we’re already prepping in the short-term, so it’s not necessary to write out a overly-detailed plan. Our brain’s memory can handle that anyway. The only thing to do is to know what we need to revise and how much progress we ideally want at what point in time. In the days of revision, all activities should be based on the revision plan.

For example, when I revised for History, I wanted to finish the outlines for all the possible essay titles—so that’s what I need to revise—in 2 to 3 days. Then, I needed to come up with a plan like this (at least in my mind):

In the last days of my revision, I was also actually learning History all day long. I only followed my revision plan and didn’t care about anything else. Because I already made up my mind: I have to prepare well for the History final.

Online Resource

Video³. By 史東183, an uploader on Bilibili. It’s pretty long—19 minutes long, so might be good if you have some mechanical, repetitive tasks to do when you watch (or listen to) it.

Link:〔Shi Dong〕I’m so stressed about the college entrance exam that I’m getting bald. How can I keep my mind at ease?⁴

What I learned from the video was active learning. This means, when you revise in the short-term, don’t even think about making beautiful, neat, and perfect notes. Instead, do problems and learn while you apply knowledge. But it’s a bit different from what I found to be suitable for me after trial and error. See this article’s last section “My Experience” for the details.

Conclusion

I think there are some differences between the short-term revision that I talked about in this article and other preparation before exams. I should be able to write another article later to talk about those other things. But, next week’s update should be on DP Chemistry textbooks which is in the series “My Experience & Tips for IB Textbooks". Stay tuned!

I hope my 4-step short-term revision method can give you some reference. I’m not a teacher but just an IB student who has bits of thoughts. If you have more thoughts and insights, feel free to discuss or share them here! (Also look for contact information at the end of the “About” section of this blog.) I’m really curious about what other people think!