If you asked ten students what revision looks like, most of them would describe some version of the same thing: reading notes, highlighting textbooks, maybe re-doing a few worked examples from class.
This feels productive. It isn’t — or at least, not in proportion to the time it takes.
The problem is the difference between recognition and recall.
Recognition vs recall
When you read through your notes, your brain is doing recognition: it sees information it’s encountered before and registers it as familiar. Familiar feels like known. It isn’t the same thing.
Recall is different. Recall is retrieval — pulling information from memory without a prompt. Recall is what the exam asks for.
If you’ve spent your revision reading, you’ve practised recognition. On the exam, when you face a blank page, you’re doing recall — and you haven’t practised that.
This explains the experience of reading through your notes the night before an exam and feeling fine, then sitting in the exam room and going completely blank. Your recognition is working. Your recall isn’t trained.
What deliberate practice means for revision
The idea of deliberate practice — working on the specific skills you’re weakest at, with immediate feedback — comes from Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer’s 1993 paper “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” (Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406). Their argument was that what separates experts from everyone else is not time spent, but time spent working at the edge of what you can already do.
Applied to exam revision, it suggests a different approach to each session:
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Identify a specific gap. Not “I need to revise quadratics.” More specifically: “I can factorise a quadratic but I stall on completing the square.” That is the thing to practise.
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Work without your notes. Attempt the problem type without reference material first. The struggle is the practice. Looking up the method immediately short-circuits it.
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Check your answer. Not just whether you got it right — what specifically went wrong, at what step, and why.
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Repeat on the same type. One worked example isn’t enough. Do five more of the same problem type, varying the numbers. You’re not practising a problem. You’re practising a method.
Spaced retrieval
Retrieval practice — the habit of actively recalling information rather than re-reading it — is one of the most robust findings in learning research. Roediger and Karpicke’s “Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention” (Psychological Science, 2006, 17(3), 249–255) found that students who tested themselves on material retained substantially more of it a week later than students who simply studied it again — even though the re-readers felt more confident at the time. The spacing effect compounds it: material retrieved once immediately and then again after a delay is retained far better than material reviewed many times in a single session.
For exam subjects, this maps to flashcard-style practice spread over weeks rather than cramming the night before. The instinct to re-read everything the evening before an exam is exactly backwards: that’s the moment when retrieval practice on the things you got wrong last week would matter most.
What to do differently
- Replace “read through notes” with “close notes and write down everything you remember, then check.”
- Replace “re-do a worked example following the solution” with “attempt without the solution, then compare.”
- Replace “one big revision session” with shorter sessions spread over days, returning to the same material after a gap.
- Replace “revise what feels comfortable” with “find the thing you’re least confident about and start there.”
The time difference isn’t huge. The difference in outcome is.
Written by James MacKellar — University of Bristol EEE undergraduate.