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By Zayna Dar, Founder, Shuhari Tuition
March is an important point in the school year for GCSE and A-level students. Exams are fast approaching, but they’re still far enough away that revision might not seem like an urgent priority. Some students begin working harder around this time, while others feel unsure about where to start.
It’s common for motivation to fluctuate during this period, especially after the winter months when energy levels are already low and the pressure of upcoming exams begins to build. Although exams might still seem like quite a far way off, March is a good time to start thinking about the approach you’re going to take to revision in the final push before exams.
There are still a couple of months to consolidate your learning and address any gaps in your knowledge or issues with your exam technique before exam season begins. Getting into a consistent routine now will help you spread your revision more evenly and work at a manageable pace without the pressure of leaving everything until the final few weeks. It gives you time to revisit challenging topics and complete practice questions, building a strong foundation for your final exams.
This blog explores the most common revision mistakes GCSE and A-level students make in March and why they prevent you from getting the most out of your study sessions. We’ll look at the importance of getting started instead of waiting for motivation to appear, creating a realistic revision timetable, and choosing effective study techniques that actually help you retain information.
We’ll also consider why avoiding difficult topics, neglecting practice questions, and failing to learn from mistakes can hold you back, alongside the importance of revisiting topics regularly and acting on feedback from teachers and tutors. Finally, we’ll discuss how to manage your workload and avoid taking on too much in a single revision session.
Waiting for motivation to appear
One of the most common mistakes students make in March is waiting until they feel motivated before they start revising. With several subjects to prepare for and other competing commitments like extracurricular activities, you might decide to put off revision until you feel motivated to start. However, waiting for the right time to get started can mean that valuable revision time slips away, leaving you with more to cover in a shorter period.
Instead of waiting for a burst of motivation, a more sustainable approach is to build revision into your daily routine. Set aside a regular time for revision each day, taking into account other commitments like homework and clubs. Incorporating revision into your daily routine helps you stay consistent even on days when you’re tired or lacking motivation. Short but frequent revision sessions are better than cramming everything in the final few weeks before exams.
Start with a short, manageable task, such as reviewing a topic you covered in class that day or running through a set of flashcards and testing your recall. Once you bite the bullet and start to build momentum, you can take on more demanding tasks like answering some exam-style questions. Set small, achievable goals to give you a sense of what you’ve accomplished and help you keep track of the topics you’ve covered. Seeing visible progress will also boost your motivation and encourage you to continue.
Revising without a clear plan
Another oversight many students make is sitting down to study without having a clear idea of what they need to cover. When you have several subjects to revise, you might find yourself jumping between topics depending on what you feel like studying that day. You might spend more time on subjects you enjoy or topics you understand, while pushing aside those you find more difficult, leaving gaps in your knowledge that you may not have enough time to address.
Spending majority of your time on topics you’re already comfortable with creates the illusion of productivity without leading to much improvement. This is where creating a revision timetable can help you organise your workload and make sure you give each subject enough attention.
Start by breaking down each subject into individual topics and identifying the areas you feel the least confident in. You can then allocate time to these topics across the weeks leading up to your exams, taking into account any other commitments and mocks that might be coming up. For each session, set yourself an achievable goal that’s realistic within the timeframe you’ve got, such as completing a set number of exam-style questions.
Creating a revision timetable makes your learning more intentional. It gives each revision session a purpose and knowing exactly what you’re working towards keeps you focused and ensures you cover all the material before your exams. However, it’s important that your timetable is realistic and flexible.
Trying to schedule too many study sessions in one day will become difficult to maintain, especially when homework, extracurricular activities, or unexpected commitments get in the way. Leave some room to revisit topics that need more attention and adjust your plan as you make progress. The aim is to give your revision some structure while making sure you can keep it up consistently in the weeks ahead.
Spending too much time rereading notes
Rereading notes is one of the most common revision techniques students rely on, as it helps them become familiar with the material. However, recognising information on a page isn’t the same as being able to recall it or apply it to an exam question. On its own, rereading notes isn’t a particularly effective revision method because it doesn’t test whether you’ve actually understood or retained the material.
To make your revision more effective, try to incorporate active recall into your study sessions. This involves testing yourself on what you’ve learnt without looking at your notes for the answers. After reviewing a topic, put your notes aside, and write down everything you can remember, or use flashcards to test your knowledge. This revision technique is called blurting. You can then check your answers against your notes and identify any areas that need further attention.
Practice questions are another useful way to test your knowledge and see how well you can apply what you’ve learnt. They familiarise you with the wording of exam questions and the mark scheme. They also reveal the level of detail required in your answers. Although reviewing your notes is necessary to learn the material, make sure you’re regularly testing yourself to check what you can actually remember, as retrieving information is a key exam skill. This will help you identify gaps in your knowledge and focus your time on the areas that need the most work.
Trying to memorise information without understanding it
When preparing for GCSE or A-level exams, some students put effort into committing facts, definitions, and formulas to memory without fully understanding what they mean. While being able to recall key information is important, rote memorisation of material won’t necessarily prepare you for questions that require you to explain or interpret information, or questions that test your ability to apply your knowledge to an unfamiliar situation.
To avoid this, make sure you understand the ideas behind the information you’re learning. When you’re revising a topic, you could try explaining a process or concept in your own words and think about how different ideas connect. For example, in science, learning a formula is a good start, but you also need to understand what each variable represents and how to apply it. In English, memorising quotes is the first step, but you also need to be able to analyse them and link them to your argument.
If you find yourself struggling to explain a concept without looking at your notes, go back over the material and work through any parts that remain unclear. You could refer to your textbook, watch a video, or ask your teacher or tutor for help. Once you understand the underlying ideas, test yourself with exam-style questions to see whether you can go beyond simply recalling information and actually apply your knowledge in a new context.
Avoiding the topics you find difficult
Another mistake some students make in the lead up to exams is spending too much time revising subjects or topics they’re confident in while putting off the ones they struggle with. Working through material you’re comfortable with might reassure you, but it doesn’t do much to address the gaps in your knowledge. The longer you leave tricky topics untouched, the more pressure you’ll feel as exams approach. The difficulty is that the topics that need the most attention are sometimes the ones that are the hardest to start.
One way to tackle this is to ‘eat the frog’, a productivity technique that involves dealing with your most difficult, important, or dreaded task first instead of putting it off. The idea is that if you start your day by tackling the task you’re most likely to avoid, you won’t spend the rest of the day worrying about it or finding reasons to delay it. For revision, this means starting with the subject or topic you find most challenging while your concentration is at its optimum.
To decide where to focus your efforts, look back at your mock papers, marked homework, or any other feedback from teachers or tutors to identify the areas where you’re losing marks. Break these topics into smaller tasks and work through them one at a time. If you’re struggling to understand something, ask your teacher or tutor for help. Addressing these difficulties in March gives you time to work on them before exam season begins.
Studying a topic once and not returning to it
Once you’ve revised a topic and feel confident that you understand it, you might tick it off your list and move on to something else. However, being able to recall information straight after studying it doesn’t mean you’ll remember it a few weeks later. This is known as the forgetting curve, which describes how memory of newly learnt information tends to decline when it isn’t reviewed. If you only review a topic when you realise you’ve forgotten it, you may find yourself having to relearn material you’ve already spent time on, leaving less time to cover the rest of the content.
This is why spaced repetition is a key technique for effective revision. It involves returning to the same material at gradually increasing time intervals, helping to combat the forgetting curve by testing your memory before too much information is lost. Each time you retrieve what you’ve learnt, you reinforce your memory of it, helping you retain the information for longer.
After revising a topic at the beginning of March, you could test yourself on it a few days later, then return to it the following week, then again a fortnight later, and so on. Each review session reinforces what you’ve learnt and makes it easier for you to recall the information later, especially when you need it in the high-pressure context of an exam. Gradually revisiting topics in this way helps you transfer memories from your short-term memory to your long-term memory.
Leaving practice questions until the last minute
Some students focus on reviewing their notes and memorising content, but leave exam-style questions until they feel confident enough to attempt them because they’re anxious about getting them wrong. However, knowing the material is only part of exam preparation. You also need to know how to interpret what each question is asking, structure your answer, and select relevant information to include in your answer so that it meets the criteria of the mark scheme. Postponing this practice until the last minute means you have less time to identify weaknesses and improve your exam technique.
March is a good time to start incorporating past paper questions into your revision, even if you haven’t covered every topic yet. Start with low-tariff questions that test recall, then gradually work towards extended response questions and full papers under exam conditions. Pay attention to the command words in each question, such as explain, compare or evaluate, as these indicate what the examiner expects from your answer.
Practising different question types will help you become accustomed to their wording. After completing a practice paper or a set of exam-style questions, check your answers against the mark scheme and see where you could’ve gained more marks. The key is to practise regularly in the build up to your final exams so you can put your knowledge into action and familiarise yourself with the demands of the exam.
Failing to learn from repeated mistakes
Mistakes are learning opportunities, so try to pinpoint the reason why you’re losing marks. As you work through past papers and exam-style questions, you may start to notice that you keep losing marks for similar reasons. Perhaps you regularly misinterpret command words, run out of time, struggle to structure longer answers, or maybe there’s another reason altogether. These patterns are worth paying attention to, as they reveal weaknesses in your exam technique that you might not notice through revision alone. If you don’t address them, you run the risk of losing marks in your final exams despite knowing the content well.
One way to tackle this is to keep track of the mistakes you make across each of your subjects. Look carefully at the mark scheme and identify exactly what the examiner was looking for and where your answer fell short. Make a note of the types of errors that come up repeatedly and look for ways to address them. For example, if you’re regularly losing marks in biology because your terminology is too generic, you could find a glossary of key terms and try to incorporate more precise scientific vocabulary in your answers.
Focusing on the underlying issue helps you work on the specific skills that are holding you back. As you complete more practice questions, check whether you’re making progress in the areas you’ve identified as your weaknesses. You could even revisit questions you previously struggled with. The goal is to make sure that the effort you put into revision leads to better performance, so you’re not simply completing more questions but actually learning how to answer them more accurately.
Ignoring feedback from teachers or tutors
Feedback from teachers or tutors gives you valuable information about what you need to work on before your exams. However, some students make the mistake of reading through their feedback on a piece of homework or an exam without processing the feedback or putting it into practice. You might understand their comments, but unless you make changes to the way you approach similar questions, you’ll continue making the same errors. With exams approaching, you should try to use the feedback you’ve received to guide your revision so that your revision is more targeted.
Start by looking back at your marked work and paying attention to the comments your teacher or tutor has made. These might highlight areas where your arguments need to be better developed or you need to show each stage of your working out to pick up method marks, for example. Try to turn each comment into a specific action you can work on during revision sessions. For instance, if your English teacher says you need to analyse quotes in greater depth, practise writing analytical paragraphs and focus on explaining how the writer’s language creates meaning. Make sure you clarify with your teacher or tutor if a comment is unclear or you’re unsure of how to work on it.
Trying to cram too much in one revision session
With several subjects to revise and exams fast approaching, you might feel the need to fit as much as you possibly can into each study session. However, trying to cover too many topics in one sitting can leave you feeling overwhelmed and make it difficult to concentrate. You might rush through the material without properly understanding it or struggle to retain the information. Spending hours on end revising doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making good progress, especially if your sessions are too demanding to sustain.
To manage your workload, break larger topics into smaller, more focused tasks. For example, if you’re revising quadratic equations in GCSE maths, you could spend one session practising factorising quadratics, then focus on solving equations using the quadratic formula in your next session. Once you’re comfortable with each method, you can move on to mixed exam-style questions that require you to decide which method to use. Setting a clear goal for each session gives you something specific to work towards and helps you see what you’ve accomplished.
At this stage in the year, it’s common for panic to set in and for students to attempt long revision sessions in the hope of making rapid progress. Although cramming might seem productive at first, your concentration will usually dip after a period of intense studying and you run the risk of becoming burnt out. This is why it’s important to be realistic about how much you can achieve in a single study session. With exams still a couple of months away, the idea is to establish a steady pace that allows you to cover the material thoroughly and return to challenging topics without exhausting yourself.
If your revision timetable leaves you with little time to rest, you may struggle to keep up the routine over several months. Review your schedule regularly and adjust it if you find that you’re consistently trying to fit too much into one day. Shorter, more focused study sessions are more effective than long study marathons. Working for around 25-30 minutes followed by a brief break helps maintain your concentration and prevents mental fatigue. When these sessions are repeated regularly across the week, you’ll make more headway than if you were to study intensively over a short timespan.
Making your revision count in the final push before exams
March is a crucial point in the year because although exams are on the horizon, there’s still enough time for you to take stock of your progress and address gaps in your knowledge or skills before the pressure of exam season increases. At this stage, you should become more selective about how you spend your revision time, for example, by looking at the topics where you consistently lose marks and considering why this happens. Understanding your weaknesses will help you choose revision methods that target them directly.
As you revise, keep an eye out for the mistakes covered in this blog that could hold you back in your exams. Recognising these mistakes now gives you an opportunity to change your approach to revision and make better use of the time remaining. Focus on making each revision session purposeful and use what you learn from the sessions to continually guide your next steps. Avoiding these common revision mistakes will ensure you’re well prepared and put you in a strong position to perform your best in your upcoming exams.
