Your exams are coming up and you’re wondering how to do everything you can to ensure they go as smoothly as possible? Whether you’re taking your GCSEs, your A Levels or an entrance exam, the art of preparing for revision is not an obscure science. It’s as easy to learn as riding a bike, and today we’ve got just the app you need to help you organise and plan your revision!

Before anything else, you need to assess the situation. Grab a pen, a sheet of paper and write down the dates of your exams to see how much time you have left before the big day. Then ask yourself what your priorities are, taking three criteria into account:

• The weightings of the different exams.
• your level.
• the type of subject.

While no subject should be neglected, you can be tactical by concentrating first on those that have a high coefficient, are more difficult for you or are ‘hard’ sciences such as maths or physics.

The ‘hard’ sciences are often the ones to work on first, because they rely on the total objectivity of your examiner. They don’t interpret anything. On the other hand, with ‘soft’ sciences such as the humanities, you rely more on personal assumptions.

Using these three criteria to define your priorities, allocate a number of hours per week to each subject and write it down on a rough draft. For example, you could have:

• 3 h mathematics;
• 2 hrs French;
• 1 h English.

To stay attentive and energetic, create short time slots (forget spending 5 straight hours on Biology) and vary the subjects on the same day. The principle remains the same throughout your revision week. It’s always a good idea to alternate between several courses!

Now that you have the basis of your timetable, i.e. the subjects and their number of hours, you can fine-tune it by thinking about several points:

• The type of activities: exercises, reading, creating flashcards, etc.
• The choice of location: your bedroom, the library, a park.
• Breaks: essential for achieving your goals and clearing your head.

Once you’ve thought about all this, you can clean up your draft using scribzee’s “Calendar” feature. There are several options available to you:

Directly from scribzee

Once you’re on the scribzee home page, click on “Calendar”, then touch your smartphone screen to create your schedule manually. Once you’ve created your schedule, you might end up with a morning that looks like this, for example:

• 7am: breakfast.
• 7.30am: 30 minutes of meditation to get the day off to a good start.
• 8 a.m.: Review English vocabulary using flashcards.
• 9 a.m.: Review your History lesson, scribzee quiz and 10-minute break.
• 11am: Maths exercises in the garden.
• 1pm: lunch break.

On scribzee, up to create a new event, all you have to do is touch the screen where no tasks have already been set or select an existing task to edit it. In short, it’s simple and intuitive!

From an external tool

You can import items from your external calendar (such as your Google calendar) by following these steps: Profile > Account preferences > Synchronise calendar.

Alternatively, you can scan the events in your scribzee-compatible Oxford diary so that they appear on scribzee. Whether you’re prefer paper organisation tools or digital ones, there’s an option for you!

Once you’ve created your schedule, you can use the app’s “Reminder” tool to set reminders. Why is a reminder essential? Because they foster regular revision…

• encourage long-term learning,
• reduce stress,
• avoid studying at the last minute.

According to the forgetting curve, a graph devised by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 19th century, we lose more than 50% of the information we remember after just two days.

To memorise a lesson properly, you need to reread it regularly. If your exams are in a few months’ time, the frequency of your scribzee reminders could look something like this:

• an initial review in the evening of the class,
• a second review on D+1,
• a third review on D+7,
• a fourth review on D+30,
• a fifth revision on D+180.

If you follow Ebbinghaus’ recommendations, you could retain 80% of the content of your course after six months of revision. Not bad at all, is it?

To go the distance, it’s essential to set fixed times for studying. As the forgetting curve shows, regularity promotes efficiency and avoids procrastination. The idea is to have realistic goals and be disciplined, while adapting to the unexpected.

To monitor the progress of your revisions, you can use scribzee’s “Progress Status” feature. By assigning a status and a colour to your revision notes, you can quickly assess your level of knowledge:

• green: under control.
• orange: almost complete.
• red: to be reviewed.

If you find that you’re less at ease in French, you can redefine your priorities and take advantage of any spare time left on your timetable to concentrate on the cards marked in red.

To keep up the pace, you can also apply the Leitner method, a system that improves the flashcard learning process. Scribzee’s algorithm shows you the cards you are least familiar with more often than the ones you’ve already learned.

How does it work?

• You launch scribzee’s STUDY mode,
• Flashcards appear question side first with the answers overleaf,
• If you get the card right, slide it to the right,
• if you make a mistake, slide it to the left.

In addition, you can try out the app’s QUIZ mode to test your knowledge and vary your learning methods. The score you get at the end of each quiz will tell you what you’ve learned and what you still need to (re)learn.

With these features and the techniques, you should be able to plan and organise your revision effectively. Whether it’s the calendar or the reminders, each tool will help you maintain a regular rhythm. What better way to prepare for D-day?