Hey guys, welcome or welcome back to my channel. So today I have such a highly requested video, it is insane. Because I posted my GCSE results. I'm scared now. Three.
And I managed to attain all nines and then one eight and one seven, which I was really, really happy about. But since then, my DMs have just been flooded with questions, asking how I studied, revision tips. And there's just been a general sense of panic coming in from lots of people asking how I did it, basically.
And although this is mainly aimed at... my uk audience this video will be broken up into two sections so the first section i'll tell you guys like individually how i advise for each subject and then at the end just some general study tips which any of you can use if you are doing exams or revising at the moment but yeah this is just going to be a bit of me sitting down and talking to you guys because i'm going to be blurting information at you and hopefully some of it will help so first of all the subjects i took were english language english literature math triple science geography p german and then religious studies and i've had so many people asking how i revised for each individual subject so i'm gonna quickly delve down into how i did each subject as quickly but as as insightfully as possible. So English language, I somehow managed to get a nine on, which I'm not sure because I am not an English girl. I feel like I've made this quite clear.
I'm much more of a STEM person. But for English language, I genuinely think it's so much about how you answer the question. I think a lot of people read the question wrong or don't know what the question's actually asking.
So I made like a little mini guide on how to answer each question from paper one and paper two. I'm really familiarized myself with like the question style and what the examiners were looking for in your answer and what the mark scheme said. I used to read through examiner reports on like the AQA website and read a bunch of different exemplar answers and then basically try and implement that into my own answer.
I also just did a bunch of practice papers for English language because I think with English, for me anyway, the only way I could really get better at it was by doing it a lot. So I remember one day me and my friend went to the cafe and we literally just did a whole paper. We'd time each individual question like separately and then give it to each other to mark and get feedback from each other. But I used to find it really helpful reading my friend's answers or marking my friend's answers because then you can see where they've gone wrong and you can like sort of implement it into your answer.
Yeah, I don't know. English language isn't my... strong suit but there we are that's what I mostly did for English language and somehow I pulled a nine and then for English literature so this was the only GCSE I got a seven in but I honestly I'm still happy with it I am not going to give too much advice on English literature because obviously this isn't the one I did the best in but I didn't read the books either so I would say 100% read the books because I didn't and I think the examiner can definitely tell if you've read or haven't read the book but for each book I did make like a summarization of each one and then I made a profile for every single character and every single theme and i had picked out quotes and analyzed them like already it's that if a question came up about that character or about that theme i already had analyzed quotes in my head because i think some people can just see a quote and then they can they know everything about it and they know what to say but i was not one of those people like i have to have some knowledge of like what to say like i couldn't just whip it out my head but in terms of learning quotes i did this for rs as well i used to write the quote down on the sticky note and stick them around my room like i remember in exam season my room was just covered in sticky notes all over my mirrors, my bedside table, my bathroom mirror, literally like opposite the toilet where I was sitting, there'd be like five different sticky notes, I'm not even joking, of different quotes because then every time you see them you are rereading that quote and then like over time it does it. it does stick in your head. Also for English Lit, I actually did the most.
I used to wake up at like, I think 5.30 a.m. and do practice English Lit questions. I'm not saying you have to wake up at 5.30 a.m.
I was just very busy. So that was like when I found time to do English Lit. And because of that time pressure before school, I used to actually time myself when doing the questions.
Otherwise, sometimes I just like pause the timer. But I did so many practice questions and then I gave them into my teacher for her to mark. And then I'd go back on the feedback.
And then in the next question, I tried me. sure to do what she said in the feedback. Math. I'm not gonna lie the most you can do for maths is practice questions.
One of the most helpful websites for maths if you aren't understanding a topic for me was Maths Genie and they have like video examples everything on their website and they had a bunch of practice questions I used to use and I also used to write out some notes for some of the chapters where you just have to like memorize stuff so like your exact trig values or like the circle theorems just like the basic stuff that you just needed to memorize the cosine rule, sine rule etc I'd write notes for that but for math it's mostly just practicing it and getting used to the exam style question. And also in class, if you don't understand something, literally put your hand up and ask. Because me in maths, in like the whole of year 10 and 11, I used to ask so many questions.
It was unreal. Like every lesson I would be asking, I don't understand that. Like, what does that mean?
But... Although you might think it's embarrassing in class, I know the people next to me didn't understand either. So they always used to find it helpful. And then it just went that when it came to revising, I didn't have to reteach myself because I'd actually understood it in lesson. Okay, moving on to sciences.
Now I'm going to do this all sort of combined because I revised my sciences quite similarly. But I took triple science, like individual ones. I think I did Edexcel higher. Okay, so my main... My advice for this is download your specification.
My school gave us topic sheets with all the spec points on it But if your school doesn't do that just go on to the AQA website or the NXL website and download the spec Which basically tells you everything you need to know and everything that's gonna possibly be in the exam And then I went through the spec and combined that with like my class notes Also notes from a revision book like save my exam or PMT and when people ask like oh a flashcard's better, a note's better etc it's honestly whatever sort of revision resource works for you but when you make this revision resource I just say make sure that you're not just making notes from your book because sometimes teachers miss things or sometimes you don't write things like realistically not every single lesson you're paying 100% attention so make sure to go through the specs so you know what you need to know and then use the information you do have from your class book but also from revision guides etc as i said and then make that revision resource for sciences I used to make notes for things I didn't understand or something that I needed to like explain to myself I need to write out and withdraw images and make it really clear for myself in my head but things I did understand but I just needed to memorize like facts I just needed to recall for like biology or like the ions and formulae in chemistry that I used to do on flashcards that isn't me understanding that's literally just information you need to memorize but say for like electrolysis in chemistry iron but I drew out so many diagrams and made it really clear clear in my head and understood it and that was how I remembered it I didn't just try and memorize something I didn't understand I made sure I understood it first make sure this happens with physics as well because it took me so long to actually understand everything but then once I understood it I didn't need to memorize it because I understood it also please please please use your teachers I used my teachers so much my physics teacher was honestly you really good at helping me with physics because I used to go with to him with like pass paper questions all the time and he Did fully explain it to me teachers are literally there for that. They are your teacher. They're always happy to help So just like at lunch or break time if you don't want to go up to them in class Just go ask them for some help or for them to explain something if there's no YouTube video out there that isn't working for you Or there's not something else that's really making sense or making it click and then once you have got this content down practice papers Oh my I could do hours and hours of revision but if you don't don't do practice questions before you go into that exam.
I'm telling you, like, yeah. I'm not saying you're not gonna do well, but it's, you'll do so much better, easier by doing practice questions and looking at the mark scheme. A bad example, which I don't recommend for the exam, but for my physics mock in year 10, I ran out of time to do revision, like proper revision. And I remember like a couple nights before, I literally just, I'd have the question paper up on one side of my screen and the mark scheme up on the other side.
I'd go through the question and read the mark scheme, almost like flashcards, because you'll get to read. that like the questions repeat themselves in exams year after year they always repeat themselves. Sitting in that mock I'd literally seen like half those questions the night before on this mark scheme and I managed to do well on it.
I do not recommend this for the GCSE because obviously you're not gonna have questions exact questions you might have seen before but the style of the question should be so similar to ones you've seen before that you'll see that and be like yeah I know exactly what they want me to write or I know exactly what calculation they want me to do and it's just like security of knowing you've got that mark and familiarizing yourself with how they're gonna ask the questions. Key word they're looking for. I don't know how else to express doing practice questions is so important. And then this is the major part, the questions that you get wrong.
What I used to do was write out the question that I got wrong and make it into a flashcard. So say I was doing like biology and I kept getting this one question wrong, I would write that out, flashcard, look at it every time I did my flashcards or my biology revision. And that's a really good way of going over the stuff you actually need to know rather than doing stuff you already know. Another major thing that I genuinely think took me off a grade in...
all my sciences is me and my friends would like revise together and we choose a topic so say in biology like homeostasis and then blur everything we know about that topic or get the spec up and go through each point and say what we know about it and then we'd almost fill in each other's like gaps of knowledge and it was just such a good way i don't know flirting for me really really helped and if you don't have a friend to do this or you don't think your friend will want to do this do it with a whiteboard so go through the spec write everything you know about that on the whiteboard and then afterwards go through what you did actually need to know and then and then fill in the thing you didn't. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm waffling, but I really hope this is helping some people. I feel like I just have so much advice to give you guys. So I really hope this is useful and not boring. Right, geography.
So I used to find human geography a lot easier because almost in class I'd like debate this and ask questions about it, which made me memorize it more. But physical geography, like learning coastlines, learning rivers was so tedious and so boring. Like I think I literally just made flashcards for like formations of coastlines, formation of Oxbow lakes, how to- sediment travels longshore drift and just memorize that sort of physical content because i did not enjoy that part of geography at all so i just knew i had to memorize that but for human geography coolgeography.com is a really good website all your case studies i wrote up big like mind maps for all my case studies which had so much of the information on it and then i also had like a geography revision guide i used to annotate that as well with case studies And then again, I'm pretty sure I just did practice questions a lot in geography also a main thing in geography which my teacher always used to say is if in the question it says like using the figure or using the source make sure to refer to that figure or source because you literally get marks just for quoting data or like analyzing a bit of data from that source and reading the questions the amount of times i'd get a paper back from my teacher and It'd be like rtq like read the question and I just would have done the wrong thing like it sounds dumb But sometimes when you're in an exam you just stress and you don't put down what you actually to put down So read the question understand exactly what they're asking for and then put that knowledge down But yeah defo learn your case studies do this early on because this will really help and the case studies I knew more on I feel Like I did a lot better on and felt more confident going into the exam and Also, another website I used to love when I just couldn't be bothered to actually revise, but I wanted to revise or I knew I had to revise was Seneca. Seneca is so good.
By the way, none of this is sponsored. Seneca is just has like all the information you need to know. It's just like your multiple choice questions. So when I was tired in bed or like on the bus in the mornings, I didn't want to revise. Bye.
needed to i would just get up seneca and do like little quizzes on my phone or my laptop and it's just like a little memory memory just got it in my memory basically uh okay oh another thing as well when you're using like revision books by yourself saying it out loud helps so much so say i like read over i annotate something in my revision guide don't just do this like do this then once you get to the end of the chapter close it and try to go share everything that you've just read or annotated or whatever or maybe say it to your mom or like your dad in the car and just tell them everything that you Annotated because saying it out loud like does ingrain it in your head. It sounds so dumb, but it literally does Pe was one of my favorite subjects, um because I really really enjoyed pe I found it really interesting if i'm honest and also one good thing about when I Was taught pe is that at the end of each lesson? Our teachers would give us practice questions on the content that we just learned and if your teacher doesn't do this Then you can go home and do practice questions on the content you've learned.
It doesn't have to be immediately after that lesson. I see some people say like go home and write flashcards every night after each lesson. And I just feel like for me anyway, that was, I wasn't able to do that.
I didn't have the time to do that. I had sports some nights. But when it gets to the end of a topic or on a weekend, when you have time do practice questions on the content you've been learning just to understand what they'll be asking you from what you from what you have been learning and you sort of understand what it's going to be like in the exam p was just a lot of memorization i'm pretty sure like i remember i just i'm pretty sure i only used revision cards for pe i also did some senecas for p when i was bored and then obviously practice questions i did no joke every single PE practice paper like on the AQA website which is really useful because PE they do really use questions like a lot a lot of the time PE you'll see the exact same question just like Jasmine instead of Henry for the person in the question another study tip I have for things like PE or sciences or for content that you just need to learn and not understand is make like mnemonics for it I used to make the most outrageous mnemonics to remember like mitosis or whatever that were just so extreme that I just remembered it or just so dumb that it would stick in my head even if it didn't really correlate at all but the more funny or more outrageous it is the more likely you're gonna remember it so that is another tip and finally for rs i actually took my rs exam in year 10 i did it a year early everyone in my school did a year earlier it was just something our school did but ours was a big essay subject so again for me it was just practicing the question for rs i'd say my biggest advice is instead of writing revision notes if that's how you revise rs write revision notes in a structure of a question so say you want to revise like say you want to revise like the existing of God pull up a practice question like a 15 mark on the existence of God and then you'll do your three paragraphs and that's only the content you need to know because there's no point learning a bunch and a bunch of content for one small topic when the most you're going to get on it is a 15 marker where you need three paragraphs argument counter argument and counter counter argument like there's no point memorizing more than that and for learning quotes again I stuck this all around my room my room was covered in Christianity and Islam quotes because those are the two religions I was doing for my RS exam and make sure you know these quotes because these are important you do need to know the quotes for your exam okay now i've waffled to you about each individual subject and i hope you've taken advice on this i'm gonna give you some general study tips like when i started revising for my gcses i've got a lot of questions on how to avoid burnout manage stress deal with pressure etc i'm gonna try cover everything and all the questions that i receive i've got a bunch of notes on my laptop so if i keep looking down here that's why but first off i've got so many people asking how they deal with procrastination how to stop procrastinating which i do think is so big because it's so easy to procrastinate i'm also definitely guilty of procrastinating like i think I think everyone does. It's just a human thing.
But when I knew I had a day where I needed to get work done, I would wake up early, I would get a change and I'd go out to like a coffee shop, a library and get my work done. Because when you're there, like what do you do to procrastinate? Because when I'm home, I'd go into my kitchen, I'd like open cupboards, walk around, come back up, do nothing. But when you're sitting in a library and you're in a work environment, for me, it made me want to work so much more or just actually made me do the work.
Cause I'm like, there's nothing else to do right here. Like I can either sit here in silence or I can do my work. Taking away as much.
Distraction as possible. Another thing is I used to use Flora all the time. I know there are multiple apps this I use Flora There's also like it's a bunch of ones.
I'm pretty sure I don't know the others like trees tree something But you can basically set like a timer and it won't let you on your phone till you till the time is ended So I set myself like 45 minutes where it wouldn't let me on my phone and I'd get the work done 45 minutes Take a 10 minute break and go back getting rid of your phone because my phone was my biggest procrastinator I literally have to switch off completely like chuck it to the side of the room because sometimes I just yeah You needed to get rid of that also in terms of procrastination having a to-do list is so so helpful i cannot function without to-do list like it's so funny i write to-do lists for genuinely everything every morning i have a to-do list so when it comes to revision or a day where you're gonna be revising or even an evening just write out what you're gonna do and then taking it off is so rewarding Well for me anyway is but also having like a sort of structure of what you're going to do stops you procrastinating as well Also with procrastination I think sometimes you can procrastinate if you have this idea that revision is like awful and that you hate it Which you can which is so fair enough because I know like revision isn't always enjoyable But try and make yourself love it sometimes not love it love is extreme But enjoy it make yourself a cute snack or like a good snack or a really good drink Or set up like a cute study environment or go to a cafe or romanticize it Like play some chill lo-fi beats in the background try enjoy it a bit more and then you you're less likely to want to keep putting it off because it's not actually that bad if you try to enjoy it more i also had a bunch of questions asking how i managed my time balance my social life and sport this is probably the trickiest part of gcse is all for me it was anyway because i was trying to carry on doing my youtube which takes up a lot of time still got all my friends still carrying with all my sports because i'm a competitive cheerleading tennis i like to go to the gym like it's it's quite a lot to do i do feel like it's a lot like it's a lot to ask from a six 16 year old like i'm still 16 and i i look back and i'm like damn that was that was difficult for me to try balance and it is difficult to balance like i think finding the perfect balance is literally impossible i used to have days where i used to get so overwhelmed with just the amount of things i needed to do but you also have to learn to say no to some things like i used to struggle if my friends invited me out to be like oh no because i don't know like you want to go out with your friends right and obviously there's a balance to this don't say no to everything but i think sometimes if there was like a party friday and saturday night and i was meeting my friends sunday night i know that would be too much much like socially and i wouldn't be able to get much done i'd be stressed so maybe i'd say no to the saturday night thing and then go out on friday night and sunday night and then try to go to the gym or something on saturday instead and do my exercise then i don't know it's really hard finding a balance i think it's a lot for experience and trying to manage your time making your timetables and to-do lists really help and just not overbooking yourself i think leaving yourself time for downtime is so important because i definitely forgot to do that at one point like you need to make sure you give yourself a couple hours where you just block in you time for yourself time where you can like have a bath or like do nothing you know just a night where you don't have to be doing something because otherwise i think it can definitely be very overwhelming i've got a question on how many hours i revise each day and this is a question i hate because as i said like some days i would be like oh i need to revise like five hours a day and then i'd end up doing nothing because i'd put so much pressure on myself to revise five hours that day like you just need to make a timetable that works for you also some people take longer to revise in my opinion work smarter not longer find efficient revision methods that work for you you know sitting for hours writing out notes could probably be condensed into an hour of blurting and whiteboarding and paper questioning practice paper questioning i don't even know what i'm saying but just using your time effectively it's not really about how long you study for just how effective it is and as long as you feel like you're on your right pathway for the timetable whatever you've made then you're fine don't set a certain amount each day i would say personally okay i also got a bunch of questions asking when i started revising my gcc so the exam started mid-may i'm not gonna lie i think i started later than quite a lot of my friends A lot of my friends died like end of March. But this was because I'm not gonna lie. I revised a lot for my mocks.
Like I remember my year 11 mocks. I revised a hell of a hell of a ton for which I highly recommend. Like yeah, I was stressed out in the start of year 11. But it made GCSE so much easier because I had revised all that content. So when it came to revising it again, I already knew quite a lot of it.
And I'd understood all that. It was just new content that I really had to focus on. And I did start later. I don't even regret it because I still feel like I had enough time. I actually made a little GCSE advice.
on my notes for people in the year below me that like were asking for advice so i think i started a cup like a week or two before easter very lightly like just an hour here and there going back over over vision resources and then i took the easter holidays like pretty seriously you don't need to be doing six hours each day i know one of my friends used to do like six hours every day and might have worked for her but i know for me like that would have burnt me out way before the gcc's even started but yeah i used to just do a couple hours each day i made myself a timetable for different subjects i made sure to still go out and easter i made sure to still like take time for myself but i would say take easter your easter holidays that's two weeks like quite seriously because that will probably help and give you like somewhere to start okay reading these notes i just remember things i used to do as well so i also used to sometimes set up time lapses of myself like if If I knew I was gonna go on my phone, like setting up your phone and then like recording yourself in a time-slap It looks so dumb like it literally looks so dumb like no one has ever seen those videos I'd delete them straight after but it means I couldn't go on my phone because it would ruin the time-slaps But also it was quite satisfying to like see me back after like doing all the work. I was like, oh go on I just sat down for 45 minutes and did all that. I used to watch toxic study motivation on tiktok Um, I don't know if i'd actually advise this I think I just used to watch really productive people and then i'd be like, okay now I need to be productive like I don't know if that's good advice either because I I say try not to compare yourself, but apparently I did this. This is on my notes. So Okay, this this is more helpful But if you're really struggling i'd say literally sit down and force yourself to do like 10 minutes and then take a five minutes break 10 minutes take a five minutes break Like you don't need to be sitting down for like copious amounts of time two hour blocks 10 minutes Like break it up really small if you're struggling or do more light revision Like just watch a youtube video or do some seneca quizzes You don't always need to be doing like hardcore revision every time like sometimes you need to warm up into that You know, I said go to a library I still agree with this.
I still go to libraries when I need to get stuff done or a cafe I'm, honestly 10 times more productive when i'm not in like my room. I don't know why work with a friend I think i've covered this working with a friend is really helpful when you want to learn knowledge Oh, this is another good thing actually like managing social life. I used to meet up with a friend So we'd meet like 10 in the morning We'd do a couple hours of vision have lunch together catch up a couple more hours of revision And then i've done a whole day's worth of revision and i've had like a little study day with my friend And that was really nice way of like still socializing during gcc's but getting work done oh yeah just a bit of it like advice as well because like i i did really well in my gcses but i wasn't the perfect student i remember one night i'm pretty sure it was before one of my physics papers i felt like i literally knew nothing and i crammed like i crammed 24 hours the night before and i know some of my friends as well just used to cram i'm not saying cram like that's not a piece of advice i'm giving because if you if you can revise and be more prepared before it takes a lot of stress away but if you don't feel prepared for one test do not stress about it like there were a few tests where I was like staying up a bit late and cramming on the bus the next morning and I still did fine like you don't need to be 100% prepared I honestly don't think anyone feels 100% prepared you literally can't do enough so don't stress if for a couple exams you don't feel ready you don't feel like you've done enough because you can cram and do okay I don't know if that's the best advice either I'm just trying to say what I did and when I used to cram I used to do the the past paper questions and answers as flashcards if I didn't have time for my own revision resources I'd literally just past paper questions flashcard password question flashcard so yeah you will be fine and that is everything i've written down on my notes i've waffled so so much i'm so sorry if this is a really long video i don't even know how long this is gonna be but i hope you got some useful information out of this and good luck to anyone watching this who is taking their gcses or is going to their mocks or any exams in general i wish you the best of luck and let me know if you have any questions in the comments i'll try to answer as many of them as i can yeah i hope you got something useful out of this and i'll see you next time