Stop Colouring-In Your Textbooks
Most UK students spend hours highlighting notes like they’re preparing for a GCSE art project rather than an exam. It feels like work, but your brain is actually asleep. You’re just decorating a failure.
Bin the highlighters
If your page looks like a neon rainbow, you’ve learnt nothing. Recognition isn’t recall. You need to force your brain to sweat, not just stare at pretty colours until you feel productive. Highlighting is just a way to avoid the actual effort of thinking.
Use the blurting method
Ditch the neat notes and write down every single thing you remember about a topic on a blank sheet of paper. Compare it to the mark scheme, see where you’re clueless, and fill the gaps in red ink. It’s brutal, it’s messy, and it is the only way to find out what you actually know before the invigilator starts the clock.
Reverse-engineer the mark scheme
Examiners don’t care about your deep understanding; they care about specific keywords and phrasing. Stop reading the textbook and start memorising exactly what the board wants to see. It’s a game of ticking boxes, so stop being a scholar and start being a professional box-ticker.
Underground Pro-Tip 💡: Use ‘Ctrl+F’ on ten years of past paper PDFs to find exactly how often specific topics appear. Most “unpredictable” modules follow a predictable rotation that the department is too lazy to change, so you can usually spot the 20-mark question coming a mile off.
Stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and start being the one who knows how to pass the test.
Leave a Reply