This may sound like common sense, but 1 thing I highly recommend as people approach exams is that they revise a lot. Obviously the more study you do before an exam the better your result is going to be, but when I say revise a lot, I don’t mean spend lots of time studying (though the more time overall the better). So let me tell you what I mean.
Slight side track here to help explain the point I want to make. I’m sure most of you have seen or heard about the changes that have happened with fitness training. People used to go for hour long runs or ride their bike for 90 min. I remember seeing guys who would go and spend 2 hours lifting weights in the gym thinking that the longer the session the better. But this is not the case, especially for resistance training.
New research has shown that you can get as much benefit from a 15 minute HIIT session as you would normally get from a 90 minute continuous aerobic training. Everyone’s workouts are becoming shorter, but they are also becoming more frequent!!
When I recommend that people revise a lot, I am telling them to revise as FREQUENTLY as possible. I remember the best results I ever got in the gym were when I went twice a day for 30 min. I would smash one part of my body during each session and it would recover before I had to use it again. This meant I was going to the gym 12 times a week, with a whole day rest on Sunday. You should do the same for your studying.
One of the best ways to revise, is to revise as often as possible. You don’t need to spend a long time studying each subject, you are better off spending less time but studying each subject everyday! In fact you could break HSC PDHPE down into the 4 modules you are doing (topics) and spend 10-15 minutes revising a module in the morning and then another 10-15 minutes revising a different module in the afternoon. If you really wanted to do long sessions, try doing 2 modules in the morning (30 min) and 2 at night (30 min). Then you would spend a whole hour studying HSC PDHPE every day between now and your exams.
This would be fantastic for your long term memory of content. Especially if you managed to spend most of this time testing yourself to recall the information and not just reading through your notes or a text book. This technique “revise a lot” is also called spaced repetition.
