How to revise a whole chapter in one evening
Priya Menon ·
Most revision goes the same way: open the chapter, start at page one, highlight things, and run out of evening somewhere near the middle. You finish knowing the first half well and the second half not at all, which is the worst possible split, because exams do not ask questions in page order.
Start at the questions, not the text
Before you read anything, do five questions on the chapter. You will get most of them wrong. That is the point: you now know exactly which parts of the chapter you need, instead of guessing. Ten minutes of being wrong saves an hour of reading things you already knew.
Read only what the questions exposed
Go back to the text with a list. Read the sections that answer the questions you missed, and skip the rest for now. This feels irresponsible. It is not. You are spending your evening on the gaps rather than on the parts that are already solid.
Explain it without looking
Close the book and say the idea out loud, as though teaching someone a year below you. The moment you stumble is the moment you have found something you do not actually understand, and it is far better to find it now than in the exam hall.
If you cannot explain it simply, you have not finished revising it.
Then test yourself again
Do another set of questions on the same chapter. The second score tells you whether the evening worked. If it did not move, the problem is usually one idea underneath the topic rather than the topic itself, and that is worth finding before you sleep.
The short version
- Test first, so you know where the gaps are
- Read only the sections that failed
- Explain each idea out loud without the book
- Test again, and compare the two scores
- Sleep. Revision you cannot remember tomorrow does not count