How to fight the plague of exam stress: a guide to Year 11
Year 11 is a stressful time, with exam pressure mounting throughout the year. Lucie Colborne and Eva Jeffery share their top tips for succeeding in the all-important GCSEs.
Dear Year 11...
It’s easy to think of GCSEs as the destination for your entire school journey. Your whole future seems to balance on your success in these exams - it’s only natural to feel the pressure. Am I revising right? Am I revising enough? Is it too late to start revising? Rest assured that everyone around you is feeling the same way; exam stress is a universal feeling we’ve all had to face. However, it doesn’t have to be a battle you lose. There are plenty of ways of relieving the stress by revising right.
Balance revision and free time
The crucial thing to remember about exams is that you have a life outside of them. Plenty of stories are spread about how a successful student will cut themselves off from distractions in the lead up to exams - this might include saying goodbye to their hobbies, their phones, or even their friends. But students can be just as successful in their exams without reducing their lives to an existence at their desks, as long as they know how to balance work with everything else. Overworking can be just as ineffective as underworking.
The first step is to identify what it is that helps you relax - this could be a sport, a hobby, or just plain Netflix - and set aside time for it. It doesn’t have to be in the form of a study planner. Though structuring your day in a planner can help, it doesn’t work for everyone, so don’t force yourself into it if it doesn’t suit you. Instead, set out your day by tasks, not times: aim to get a certain amount of things done per day. Even if it’s only copying out a few notes, any amount of work builds up over time. While you’re revising, put away all distractions, including your phone. Revision and relaxation must be kept separate, but equally important. Give time and dedication to both.
Find what works best for you
You might have already had mock exams, or have them coming up. The results of these mocks aren’t the most important thing - what you take away from them matters much more. Note which revision techniques work and which don’t, and how you need to change your strategies to do better. Everyone revises differently. Past papers are helpful, but only if you already know some of the content. Writing out notes with pretty stationary doesn’t do it for everyone. Flashcards keep you organised as long as you can be bothered to write them all out.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, revision becomes far more fun when you do it with friends. The problem that arises with study groups is also obvious: you’d rather have a chat with your mates than look at enzyme activity. So how do you both stay focused and make revision a little less dull? For starters, it’s never a great idea to revise in large groups. Try working in twos, threes, or even fours; this way you’re less likely to distract each other. Then set each other work, but make sure you don’t all revise the same things. Choose a topic each and write your own sets of notes (you don’t have to spend too long doing this, because the longer you take the more likely you are to take a break and never come back to it). Afterwards, you can teach each other what you’ve learned, which will help you and your study partners memorise the information.
It’s never too late to start
Procrastination is a killer when it comes to revision. No one wants to revise: it’s boring, it takes forever, and nobody’s going to hold you to account if you don’t do it. When faced with revision, anything but revising suddenly seems like the better option. And before you know it, it’s the night of your first exam, you’ve only read a few pages of the textbook, and all you can think about is opening an envelope of Ds and Es on results day. It doesn’t have to be this way, but you don’t have to start revising a year in advance either.
The best time to start cracking down on revision is probably several months before exam season, though this might be optimistic. Many students find it hard to keep up with weekly revision when the exams seem so distant. If this is you, don’t stress about starting late. There’s always time. Work on what you’re most struggling with and definitely don’t give into the temptation to revise what you already know.
Remember to take it easy between the work. You’re the one in charge of your revision and your results.
Lucie Colborne, Year 12
Balance revision and free time
The crucial thing to remember about exams is that you have a life outside of them. Plenty of stories are spread about how a successful student will cut themselves off from distractions in the lead up to exams - this might include saying goodbye to their hobbies, their phones, or even their friends. But students can be just as successful in their exams without reducing their lives to an existence at their desks, as long as they know how to balance work with everything else. Overworking can be just as ineffective as underworking.
The first step is to identify what it is that helps you relax - this could be a sport, a hobby, or just plain Netflix - and set aside time for it. It doesn’t have to be in the form of a study planner. Though structuring your day in a planner can help, it doesn’t work for everyone, so don’t force yourself into it if it doesn’t suit you. Instead, set out your day by tasks, not times: aim to get a certain amount of things done per day. Even if it’s only copying out a few notes, any amount of work builds up over time. While you’re revising, put away all distractions, including your phone. Revision and relaxation must be kept separate, but equally important. Give time and dedication to both.
Find what works best for you
You might have already had mock exams, or have them coming up. The results of these mocks aren’t the most important thing - what you take away from them matters much more. Note which revision techniques work and which don’t, and how you need to change your strategies to do better. Everyone revises differently. Past papers are helpful, but only if you already know some of the content. Writing out notes with pretty stationary doesn’t do it for everyone. Flashcards keep you organised as long as you can be bothered to write them all out.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, revision becomes far more fun when you do it with friends. The problem that arises with study groups is also obvious: you’d rather have a chat with your mates than look at enzyme activity. So how do you both stay focused and make revision a little less dull? For starters, it’s never a great idea to revise in large groups. Try working in twos, threes, or even fours; this way you’re less likely to distract each other. Then set each other work, but make sure you don’t all revise the same things. Choose a topic each and write your own sets of notes (you don’t have to spend too long doing this, because the longer you take the more likely you are to take a break and never come back to it). Afterwards, you can teach each other what you’ve learned, which will help you and your study partners memorise the information.
It’s never too late to start
Procrastination is a killer when it comes to revision. No one wants to revise: it’s boring, it takes forever, and nobody’s going to hold you to account if you don’t do it. When faced with revision, anything but revising suddenly seems like the better option. And before you know it, it’s the night of your first exam, you’ve only read a few pages of the textbook, and all you can think about is opening an envelope of Ds and Es on results day. It doesn’t have to be this way, but you don’t have to start revising a year in advance either.
The best time to start cracking down on revision is probably several months before exam season, though this might be optimistic. Many students find it hard to keep up with weekly revision when the exams seem so distant. If this is you, don’t stress about starting late. There’s always time. Work on what you’re most struggling with and definitely don’t give into the temptation to revise what you already know.
Remember to take it easy between the work. You’re the one in charge of your revision and your results.
Lucie Colborne, Year 12
Dear Year 11...
Exams are an extremely stressful experience for everyone. Juggling revision with a social life and part-time work is incredibly hard - add the threat of the exams looming over you, and it becomes exhausting. Hopefully, this article will help give you some ideas on how to manage these problems, and while not all tactics work for everyone, it’s worth giving them a proper go first.
Balancing various aspects of your life is a tough challenge, even before you have to add in heaps of revision. Revision should not take over every inch of your life, but a good balance between work and social time is crucial to getting the grades you need. You shouldn’t isolate yourself completely, or have every conversation dominated by how much or how little or what kind of revision you’re doing, but you also should try and avoid finding excuses to spend an extra hour or two scrolling through Instagram. There’s no formula for the perfect balance of work and life, and how much time you’re going to need to dedicate to studying is entirely up to you. Having your own tried-and-tested study tactics is a excellent, scientifically proven way of helping you manage your life and work, and will help you minimise your stress.
Trial and error will play a key part in finding what revision tactics work for you, so it’s best to try and work this out early on. That way, you have time to use these revision methods to their fullest for the exams themselves. Revising with friends is great too, but not if you only copy other people’s revision methods and find yourself lost in useless notes. Starting the revision process too early isn’t advisable either, especially if you know you’re going to have to cut yourself off from distractions while revising, since you don’t want to sacrifice your social life and friendships. Needless to say, cramming the night before is not an effective revision method, unless you’re refreshing your memory from at least a month or so of structured revision.
Although finding the right revision method takes a bit of time, there’s a lot of ideas out there to use, and once you’ve found the right one, the work itself becomes far less of a chore. Flashcards, mind-maps, videos, reward systems and past papers are all excellent methods of revising in small manageable pieces. Breaking down subjects into smaller and smaller sections makes the workload a lot less daunting and easier to remember. You’re essentially tricking yourself into thinking you’re doing a lot less work than you actually are, and the chances of you remembering these little sections are a lot higher than they would be if you tried to tackle an entire paper’s worth of potential material in one sitting.
A really good way of doing this and maintaining the aforementioned work/life balance is a study planner. This might not work for everyone, but it’s often beneficial if you stick with it for more than a couple of weeks. Study planners themselves are a simple concept: your week is laid out in front of you with revision slots allocated about when you have time. Yes, see that? When you have time. You don’t have to reorganise your entire life around revision. A study planner is built up around your existing life, and helps you put in manageable amounts of revision when you have enough time and energy for them to be effective. Another key thing to remember is that you’re revising a set amount of work, not a set amount of time. It’s all well and good saying you’ve spent an hour doing maths, but after factoring in all that set up time and quickly checking you haven’t been messaged, or no-one’s posted anything since you last checked, or waiting for the kettle to boil, you’ve realistically done about twenty minutes and are probably frustrated you didn’t manage to cram three terms of knowledge into this session. So fitting manageable revision tasks around a social life doesn’t seem so difficult with the study planner.
Study groups are always a good tactic in theory, but in reality they often end up as meeting with your friends and doing an incredible ten minutes of revision before wandering off. This isn’t to say you can’t revise with your friends, or that you can’t reward yourself with a new episode of your favourite show – these things are encouraged too – but you’ve got to focus on what is going to work for you and get those grades where they need to be. Helping each other out is critical, and making sure you’re not isolating yourself or other people is something to watch out for when trying to form a study group. Taking two to three people from your class, not necessarily your friends and not too many more than three (it becomes mayhem otherwise), and using one of your study-planner slots as a group meeting time is a good place to start. Chose a topic and find an activity, task or section of information for each person in your group to handle. (Yes, you still have to do work individually - you can’t just grab the smartest person in you class and make them do all the work while you half-heartedly ask questions and colour in the bubbles on the mind-map.) Now, once each person has done their task, you go back to the group and hand around copies of the notes you’ve made, and take notes from the others. You’ve now got three sets of revision notes for the price of one, and you have a group of people to discuss the notes with. Asking questions at this point is crucial to make sure everyone understands the notes, and is a good opportunity to cement what you’ve learnt by trying to explain it to someone else. As you can see, study groups help give you a good mix of social and school work, and can make everything less stressful and a lot more manageable in the run up to exams.
Preparation for the exams will of course reduce the stress, but there are also other ways to help relieve anxiety. Though most people hate it because it’s mentioned every time you bring up stress, exercise is a very good way of getting rid of those tense feelings pretty quickly. This isn’t to say you have to work out at the gym for an hour every day, or cycle for miles between past papers – a ten minute walk somewhere a little greener than your living room does the same trick. Taking small breaks, with small rewards for doing a set amount of work, and getting yourself out of the house once in a while will really help to cope.
You’re not going to get rid of stress entirely, and a small amount helps drive your performance. But being able to manage exam and revision stress is key to getting good results and keeping a functioning social life. Hopefully this article has helped give some ideas about managing stress and has given you a couple potential solutions to try. And if they don’t work, don’t stress about it - there’s plenty of other methods for you to try!
Eva Jefferys, Year 12