For some reason you’ve ended up in the situation where you haven’t done any revision and it is one week until your A Level exams. Nightmare. Whilst you may not be able to shoot for those A*s anymore (well maybe you can, but it’s highly unlikely) there are many things you can do to maximise the time you do have and revise as best as possible.

1. Prioritise

With such little time you have to prioritise. You can do this by looking at what you covered most recently (we wouldn’t go over it except for a quick read through if it’s really recent) and what you found the hardest. We'd also look at what shows up a lot on papers by looking through past papers. You can’t cover everything, you just can’t. Do the things you did at the start of the year, the things you don’t understand and the things that often show up, then do other things if there’s time.

2. Plan the revision process

Once you’ve settled on what the most pertinent things to revise are, you need to plan. Use an online planner or just a regular paper one but map out what you are going to do every single day until the exam. Make it clear as well- don’t just write ‘revise biology’ as you’re likely to go off track. Bullet point the things you will do to revise, such as ‘make mitosis flow diagram’, so that when you sit down to study you don’t waste time thinking about what to do.

3. Go through past papers only if time allows

Normally we’d also suggest past papers, but with this tiny amount of time we’d suggest leaving that until last because it is much more important that you know the content rather than waste time doing that. If you have time, either just do a couple of papers or just go through the questions you got wrong on tests in the past as a quick way to do questions about things you struggle with- this is the best way if you have very limited time left.

4. Take care of yourself

Upon saying all of this, you also can’t forget to take care of yourself. It’s bad enough being in this situation, but if you then feel tired or unwell then it’ll just make the situation worse. Try to eat well and keep hydrated so you stay alert and also try to get a decent amount of sleep (you should get around 8 hours a night). You can’t change the situation now so rather than wasting time being annoyed at yourself, the best thing to do is to just sit down and get on with it.

Hopefully this scenario won’t apply to you, but if it does then we wish you all the best with your revision. Keep going, you can do it!