Revision

Cambridge terms are short and intense. There is limited time to revise during term time; most students just about keep on top of the work they need to do for their contact hours. This is why having well-organised notes is crucial: there’s not an enormous amount of time for revision over the vacations, and the less time is wasted in fixing disorganisation, the better.

Timetabling

Just as with your time here during term, it’s a good idea to make a timetable for your revision, so you know what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. There are two key elements to a good revision timetable: being realistic, and being specific.

A realistic timetable allows time for rest, relaxation and recovery after the rigours of a Cambridge term, with enough time to focus on work. For example, over the Christmas vacation there are six weeks (42 days). You are not expected to work every day; neither are you expected to do no work at all. Here’s how you might break it down; take off weekends, it’s 30 days; take off bank holidays, 27; take off a week for a total break from everything, that’s 20 days. If you do 4-6 hours’ work per day, that’s 80-120 hours’ revision in total. Knowing that allows you to work backwards to construct a balanced, sensible timetable.

A specific timetable takes the guesswork out of your revision. If you have twenty hour-long slots all marked ‘maths’, it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing too much on one lecture block and nothing on others. So, instead, be specific about what you’re going to do on a given day: Maths, lectures 1-3, review lectures + examples; Maths, past paper 2024 section A, etc. That way you can be sure of covering everything you want to cover.

Active learning

To properly learn material, it’s crucial to engage with it. Reading alone is usually not enough – it can be easy to glaze over or skip portions. Highlighting isn’t much better – it’s really only glorified colouring-in. The best way to engage with the material is to take notes as you go, summarising concepts or picking out extracts and using your own words to outline how you’d answer questions on this subject. This is true even in mathematical subjects: you can write down what you’re going to do in steps through a problem, rather than getting bogged down in formulae and details. Spider diagrams are good for organising your thoughts; flash cards are great for things you need to Just Remember; essay plans can be as helpful as writing the full essay.

Lecture recordings

Some people plan to watch all their lectures again as part of their revision. This is a terrible idea. Lectures are meant to be the introduction to the topic and the content: a solid starting point for your learning. Memorising the content of the lectures (and nothing further) will not lead to good results in exams. So, by all means watch occasional bits of lectures again, if you need a recap of particular topics, but do this sparingly. (Also, you will likely not have time to watch all the lectures again. By way of example, Natural Scientists in the first year have 12 lectures per week, for 8 weeks, total 96 lectures – that’s very nearly 5h per day for every day of the Christmas vacation, assuming breaks as detailed above. That’s definitely not possible!)

Practising under exam conditions

Exams at Cambridge are hard, and you’ll find you fall under immense time pressure. You will have remarkably little time to marshal your thoughts, approach the questions and get your ideas down. Many students find this different to exams at school, where it could often be possible to get everything done with time to spare. Practising full exam papers under exam conditions is therefore essential so you don’t have any surprises when it comes to the actual thing. Read the notes on the front of the exam paper, find out how much time you have to answer, and aim to be laser-focussed on the questions for the full amount of time and no more. Sometimes that will mean giving up halfway through a question and moving on to the next one; it’s better to attempt the right number of questions and leave some of them incomplete than to spend too long perfecting an answer but only doing half of the questions you’re supposed to do.

Working with others

Part of why supervisions work so well is that they put you in a situation where you have to exchange ideas – with your supervisor as well as with your peers. Outside term, there are fewer structured opportunities for this exchange – but that doesn’t mean they can’t exist. You might consider organising work parties with others, where you call each other up on Zoom or Teams and discuss essays, revision or questions – or simply work in companionable silence for a given amount of time. But this only works if you’re actually working – it’s not a time for a chat about Netflix. And if you can’t work with others, then simply explaining things out loud works well – some people have a rubber duck on their desk and will talk them through things. Practising formulating and phrasing an argument is an extremely valuable tool.

Where you work

When you’re working away from Cambridge, your working environment can help or hinder you, just as when you’re in College. You may have a room at home which you’re able to colonise for your work; that may need to be your bedroom (though separating work and living spaces is always a good idea if you can). Some people work in a local library (and find a pair of headphones or earplugs useful). Wherever it is, try to minimise distractions as much as possible – in a similar way to when you’re in a lecture, consider using Work Focus on your computer, turning your phone onto Airplane mode, etc. If you’re at home, you might want to set ground rules for others in the house – what time you have lunch, coffee etc., or some sort of sign that you’re doing a timed set of questions and don’t want to be disturbed. It’s also worth noting that if you’re working at home there’s no real separation between work-home and home-home; some people have found that a 10-15 minute walk every day before starting work and after finishing work acts as your ‘walk to work’ and ‘walk home’, delimiting the portions of the day and allowing you time to get into the mindset of ‘work home’ or ‘home home’. 

 

Exams

At school, most exams have a syllabus and mark scheme. These let you know the framework for your revision: ‘if you learn all these things, you will do well in your exam’. It’s possible to get 100% in many exams, and several people do (particularly in science). School exam questions will be very similar to those from previous years or from mock exams; in scientific subjects, the structure of the questions doesn’t really vary year on year (it’s just the way they’re framed or the numbers which are different); in essay subjects, it’s possible to learn some essay plans and simply reproduce them in the exam.

Cambridge exams are not like this. Yes, the course has a structure and intended learning outcomes, but you’ll hardly ever find a list which details exactly what you need to learn, no more, no less. But something which is the same as exams at school is that the examiners want to differentiate stronger candidates from weaker ones. The difference is that here we’re starting from a much higher baseline of ability and understanding.

This differentiation is something which lots of students find challenging, all the way through their degree. Many students come from an environment where they are among the top handful of students in their year and arrive in an environment where they are average. Many students come from an environment where it is possible to know everything (and they can sometimes prove that, by getting 100% in an exam), and arrive in an environment where by design there is always more to know. And many students come from an environment where they understand most concepts relatively quickly, and arrive in an environment where there will be topics and concepts which only start to make sense after sustained, intensive work. The quicker you’re able to adapt, the more prepared you’ll be for exams.

There’s no getting around it: pretty much everyone finds the exam period and the exams themselves really stressful. Some of the reasons are obvious – it’s easy to feel the pressure to perform, to get a good result, to know as much as possible going into it. But it’s also important to remember that a degree course at Cambridge is not like your studies at school. The examiners want to see not just what you have learnt, but how you can apply it. And, as mentioned above, you’re not expected to know everything. One lecturer tells their students that they expect the average mark in an exam question to be 11/20. If there’s a question which everyone can perfectly, it’s of no help to the examiner in differentiating the ability of candidates. (Actually, this is also true in school exams –it’s just that undergraduates at Cambridge are taken from the higher-performing end of the population.)

In the days leading up to the exam, pace yourself. Work, eat, relax, sleep. Hopefully, you’ll have made a timetable; try to stick to it, no more, no less. Talk to your friends, and try to talk about something other than work. The more grounded you can keep yourself before exams, the better your mindset will be when they arrive.

If your exam is done on a laptop, the night before the exam, make sure your laptop is charging. On the day, again, try to pace yourself. Exercise, eat, get your things together, find a bottle of water, mentally prepare. When the time comes for the exam itself, wherever it may be, get there a bit early – you don’t want to be scrabbling around with only a few minutes to go.

In the exam itself, read the instructions carefully. Sometimes, students have got bad marks because they’ve answered too many or too few questions. Work out the timings for each section of the paper, and for each question – you’ll need to stick carefully to those. (Take, for example, a hypothetical paper, where you have to answer ten questions from section A (for six marks each) and four questions from section B (for 30 marks each) in a standard time of three hours. That’s a total of 180 marks and 180 minutes – so you’d be looking to spend six minutes per question on Section A and 30 minutes per question on Section B. If you spend eight minutes per question on Section A, that’s taken 20 minutes out of the time for Section B – and your answers to that section will suffer. As another example, if in a paper you have to write three essays in three hours, and take 1h 10 for each of the first two, you’ve only got 40 minutes for the third – that’ll result in a shorter (and likely worse) third essay.)

Nearly everyone comes up against questions they feel they can’t answer – ‘how do I even approach this?’. Breathe, don’t panic. The examiner won’t have asked a question that students can’t do. Think back to how you’ve approached questions in supervisions: marshal your knowledge, understand what the question is asking, look for ways in, remember what you’ve learned about how to structure your approach to a question.

A final bit of advice: read the question thoroughly and make sure you know what it’s asking you to do. For an essay, answer the question that’s set, not the question you wish had been set. (Many students info-dump knowledge from a related lecture, rather than specifically answering the question. This leads to bad marks.) For a problem-sheet question, make sure you answer the question as set – if it has two parts, answer both, not just the first; if it says ‘use the fact that x’, use that fact.

What about after the exam? It’s easy to dwell on what you should have done, or how it went – again, that’s a habit learned at school, where people discuss the questions with each other. By all means, do that if you want, but it won’t help you change your marks: what’s done is done. Better to go and get Jack’s and start to ready yourself for the next one.

Mitigating circumstances

Sometimes things will happen which will affect your performance in exams – a close relative dies, you’re ill, etc. Sadly, these things happen. If they do, it is absolutely vital that you talk to your Tutor (or the Wellbeing Service, or come to the Tutorial Office) as soon as possible. The sooner we know about issues the sooner we can help sort them out. Don’t leave it till closer to the exam and hope that things sort themselves out; definitely don’t leave it till after the exam. Every year, students are surprised and disappointed when the University won’t make allowances for circumstances disclosed weeks or months after an exam. To reiterate: it is absolutely vital that you talk to us as soon as possible if things happen which might affect your performance.