Instead of asking, how many hours should I study a day for exams?, let’s start by considering the question “why should I study?”
We need to study so that we can pass our exams, further our education and make suitable career choices. How do we do this? By covering the specification so that we fully understand the content and can make connections between topics.
This means we need to schedule the content in our planner or calendar to ensure we fully cover the specification before our exams.
How long will this take? It depends on a number of factors. For example, your learning speed, which subjects you find more challenging, which subjects have a heavy content, how many GCSEs you are doing and so on.
So, when you take this all into consideration, you can see that there is no clear-cut answer to the question “how many hours should I study a day for exams”.
But don’t despair! Because there are simple steps that you can follow to find a daily revision length that works for you. Follow the simple steps below to help you.
Step 1: Identify your study focus time.
If you are someone who makes a habit of revising well ahead of exams, you probably already know what length of study time works for you. If not, there are some popular methods that work well for many. The first is the Pomodoro technique. This is where you revise for 25 mins with your timer on, take a 5 mins break and repeat. This technique is well known to increase focus and avoid distractions. But it has a disadvantage. And that is, if you are someone who prefers to get into momentum while studying, it might not be the best. So, here’s an alternative technique you can try. It is the 50/10 study method. You probably guessed it. This is where you revise with no interruptions for 50 minutes, take a 10 minutes break and repeat. This is how I generally work.
As you start to revise, you’ll begin to identify what works best for you. My advice is to not go over 1hr in a study session as your brain will get saturated and you’ll lose focus. So, make sure you plan to have several breaks. You’ll need 5 to 15 minutes break between sessions depending on the length of your study time.
Try these techniques to see what works well for you. Once you’ve identified your ideal study focus length, you can use this to plan your revision timetable within those timescales.
Step 2: Create a revision timetable.
On a piece of paper, write down all the subjects you are studying. Then rank them in order of difficulty. I.e. which subjects do you find more difficult? Rank the same list again according to the amount of content that needs to be covered for each subject. Subjects with the heaviest content should be at the top. Then, take the top three subjects from each list as your priority subjects. As some subjects may come up in both lists, you may end up with up to five priority subjects. Schedule these subjects into your planner making sure that you allocate more time for them. You may need to do a two-weekly timetable to accommodate this. Having a timetable will start to give you some idea of the number of subjects you need to cover so that you can start to gauge a rough time.
if you need help creating revision timetables, see this.
Step 3: Break your subjects into units.
This can be a little time consuming but it’s worth it. Let’s take AQA GCSE chemistry as an example. If you glance the student book or a good exam-endorsed revision guide, you’ll see there are four main units and 15 sub-units. Plan to cover these units over a period of time. With 15 sub-units you can cover one sub-unit each week. That’s one unit every month and the entire chemistry specification will be covered in 4 months. Remember this is just a guide as you’ll be revising more during half-terms and on other school breaks compared to when you are in school.
So now in your timetable instead of just writing chemistry, you can write e.g. ‘chem- atomic structure’ or ‘chem – periodic table’ and so on. Schedule one or two extra revision sessions in your timetable for a sub-unit check, including practicing exams questions. Breaking up your subjects helps you to see clearly what you have to study and how much time you have to cover the contents. You’ll also get a better idea of which subjects or topics will take longer to cover.
Step 4: Plan when to start revising & stick to it.
If you’ve done step 1 to 3, that is, created a revision timetable and planned for revising all the units in your various subjects; you should now have a better idea of how much time you need to revise daily. Have a revision start date and end date in mind, taking into account your exams timetable. Stick with it as much as you can but at the same time, don’t worry if that doesn’t always happen. If for some reason you are not able to revise one day, catch up the next day. Or just watch a 5 minutes video on BBC Bitesize or YouTube about a specific topic. You’ll be surprised how much you learn.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there’s not a simple answer to the question “how many hours should I study a day for exams”. You need to plan and organise your subjects and schedule them into a calendar.
Give yourself a good length of time to study but don’t overdo it. Get a balance that works for you. You need to know yourself, how quickly you understand concepts, the subjects you find easier and harder, etc. Remember, it’s better to study actively for 50 minutes and actually learn and recall information than 4 hours where all you’ve done it just stared at a book.
My best advice to you will simply be to start revising early. Good luck!
