How to revise from your lecture notes without just rereading them
Most students revise the same way. They open the handout, read it from the first page to the last, and then read it again. By the second time through, everything looks familiar, so it feels like the work is done.
The trouble is that recognising a sentence when it is in front of you is much easier than producing it from memory with a blank answer sheet on your desk. The exam asks you to produce it.
This guide walks through a way of revising that makes your brain do the harder, more useful work.
Read once, properly
You still need to read the material. Do it once, slowly, with a pen. At the end of each section, stop and ask yourself what the section was about in one or two sentences. If you cannot say it, read that part again before moving on.
Write your one-line answers down. These become the skeleton of your revision.
Close the notes and test yourself
This is the part most people skip. Put the handout away and try to recall what you just read. You can do it in a few ways.
- Write out everything you remember about a topic on a blank page, then check it against your notes.
- Answer practice questions on the topic before looking anything up.
- Explain the topic out loud to an imaginary coursemate who missed the class.
Every gap you find is a gift. It shows you exactly what you do not know yet, while there is still time to fix it.
Space it out
Cramming everything the night before can get you through a test the next morning, but most of it fades soon after. You remember more when you come back to a topic a few times with gaps in between.
A simple pattern that works for most courses is to revisit a topic the day after you first study it, again a few days later, and again the following week. Each time, start by testing yourself before you look at the notes.
Mix your topics
When you practise one kind of question over and over, you get fast at it, but only because you know what is coming. In the exam, questions arrive in a random order.
Once you have covered a few topics, mix them up. Do a question on finite automata, then one on Turing machines, then go back to automata. It feels slower, and that is a sign it is working.
Make it easy to start
The hardest part of revision is often just getting started. Lower the cost of starting by keeping your material for each course in one place, and by having questions ready before you sit down.
This is what Revyse is built around. You upload the handout, slides or photos of your notes for a course, and Revvy makes a summary, practice questions and flashcards from that material. When you sit down to revise, you can go straight to testing yourself instead of building the questions first.
A simple revision session
If you want a routine to follow, try this for each topic.
- Read the summary of the topic and note anything that is new to you.
- Close it and answer ten practice questions without looking.
- Go through the review and reread only the parts you got wrong.
- Make flashcards for anything you missed twice.
- Come back to those flashcards tomorrow.
It takes a little longer than rereading, and it feels harder. That feeling is what learning feels like while it is happening.
