Are you about to take exams, the baccalaureate, the brevet, your midterms or a competition ? You have an astronomical amount of things to know and you are certainly swamped with revision. But to revise well , there are several mistakes to avoid! To save you from wasting time and succeed in the tests that await you , in this article, we present the eight mistakes to avoid so that your revisions go smoothly!
Mistake #1: Revising does not mean learning!
At Les Sherpas, we know all about revision! We’ve all been there. The aspect that is often neglected in revision is the very definition of this activity. Yes, revising does not mean learning ! You have to be aware that when you are in revision mode, you don’t have time to learn new things.
When you revise, you exercise your memory by reviewing what you have already read and learned. Your brain is in “reading” mode , you train it to mobilize information that you have stored during your learning. Conversely, when you follow a course or read a lesson, it is in “writing” mode , your brain imprints the information in your memory.
It’s like a computer, when you ask it to perform two heavy and different operations, it slows down… like your brain. After a while, your head will end up overloading 🤯
👉 With this in mind, to optimize your “reading” mode you need to organize yourself well so that you are in battle order on the day of the exam!
Mistake #2: Not preparing a revision plan
Being motivated to work is great, but you still need to know in which direction you are going and how you are going to proceed! You probably haven’t made a revision schedule or a detailed program? Many students rush headlong into revision , they study their lessons without much organization… and end up mixing everything up. Making a schedule is an effective revision method that has proven itself for millions of students!
To build yourself a schedule, you just need to follow three super simple steps :
📌 For each subject, start by listing all the concepts and themes that you need to cover . You take a sheet, you indicate the title of the subject , the list of chapters and the concepts that relate to it. It couldn’t be simpler.
📌 Then, you make a schedule for a “typical” revision day. You assign a slot in the day for each subject you want to revise. 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours… The main thing is that you are consistent with yourself by respecting the slots that you set in your diary. The ideal is that you are able to revise as much material as possible in the day while being efficient.
📌 Last step, you have to project this typical day over your entire revision schedule , several months, several weeks… The principle is to check that you can fit all of your revisions into a time frame that you define . Once this is done, you then have to calibrate the time you allocate to each subject according to your weak points and the importance of their coefficients.
When you haven’t made a schedule and you have two days left to learn the equivalent of a semester
When you establish your revision program, you have to be strategic ! The mistake here is to work only on your strong points. You must therefore balance your revision days , even if you prefer to work on a subject that is important to you, you must not neglect those where you are the least good.
It’s really nice to study hard on a subject you like, we grant you that, but the mistake you shouldn’t make is to spend too much time revising your strong points . Working on a subject with a coefficient of 2 when you’re bad at a subject with a coefficient of 5 isn’t very smart…
If you spend more time on a subject with a coefficient of 2 and you get a great grade, in the end it will still give you fewer points than if you had obtained the same grade in a subject with a coefficient of 5. The idea is to know which subject you should concentrate your revision time on .
To illustrate this idea and make it more concrete, we wanted to present you the law of diminishing returns . To put it simply, it is a mathematical law that establishes the relationship between your results and the time spent working . If we refer to the graph below, on the abscissa, you find the efforts made in revision and on the ordinate it is the progress of your results.
The curve therefore represents the evolution of your results according to the efforts you make . As you can see, we can divide the graph into three zones:
👉 The first one where your initial efforts produce a rapid increase in your results .
👉 The second, where your results are still increasing, but less noticeable . It’s like going from 13.5 to 14, you pass a level, but with a simple half point. In this zone, increasing your results will require more intense efforts.
👉 The third is the stagnation zone . The last points are the hardest to scratch. Going from 15 to 18 is often much more difficult than making a jump from 5 to 10. The problem at this stage is that too intense efforts can actually result in a drop in your results .
What you need to understand in this graph is that for the same amount of effort , in a subject where you are weak and in a subject where you are stronger, your results will be much greater in the subject where you are the worst !