A simple study technique to prioritise your time
Don’t waste effort revising stuff that’s only ever worth a few marks. Simply carry out the process below using past papers from the resource links on the right and you will soon get a “league table” of marks to rank your revision priorities.
- Go through each paper and list how many marks are available for each main specification topic area
- Calculate an average of the marks for all the past papers (so if 10, 12, 11 etc for acids in june 2003, jan 2004, june 2005) then you know acids is worth about 11.
- Create a league table, ranking the topics which average the highest on top.
- Voila! You now have a list of importance to organise your revision.
This works so well because it stops you spending too much time on one area that’s never worth many marks. For example, in CHEM4 for AQA, acids are woth on average 15 marks compared to 7 for rates, so you’d spend twice as much time revising acids than rates! It also starts gettting you familiar with the formats of the papers.
Perhaps if you do the league tables, you could post them here as a reply so others could share…
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