After tutoring GCSE and A-Level maths for over six years, this is by far the most common question i get asked. How do i revise for GCSE Maths? What's the best way to revise? How much should i revise for GCSE Maths and how much time should i spend revising? Let's answer all of those questions.
What topics are you confident with?
Something that a lot of year 11 students tend to do is get their mock exam results and focus on topics they got wrong straight away. Sounds like the best thing to do, right? Well we have an alternative suggestion.
Let's say you got your year 11 mock exam results and you notice you did great on trigonometry and on expanding double brackets too. You then don't revise these because you feel you don't need to. After three or four weeks of not covering these topics, they can easily get forgotten. All of those topics you did great on in your mock exams are no longer your strong areas because you let them slip. So how can you fix this? When you start revising for GCSE Maths, first focus on topics you got right. Focus on your strongest topics first. This is by far the best way to build up a strong foundation for when you do start to revise topics you're weaker on.
When you've covered all of those topics you're confident with, you have a strong foundation and can move onto the next step.
What topics are most likely to come up?
No one knows what topics will definitely come up each year in exams. However, by looking at recent exams from previous year's GCSEs for AQA, Edexcel, OCR and other exam boards, tutors and examiners and teachers can get a pretty good idea of what commonly comes up. We use this to put together predicted papers and lists of the most common GCSE Maths topics for higher tier and foundation tier.
We highly recommend revising these 10-15 topics first. If you're on higher tier this is topics such as sine rule, cosine rule. completing the square, factorising quadratics, vectors and circle theorems. If you're a foundation tier student in year 11 then it's best to start off with LCM and HCF, factorising, expanding brackets, probability and standard form as these all come up time and time again. So in summary, start on topics you're good at, then move on to topics that are super likely to come up.
What topics do you struggle with?
Now that you have a strong foundation from working on your strongest areas of GCSE Maths. Now that you also have a grasp of the topics most likely to come up on the exams in May and June, we'd say you have a strong position to start looking at areas you're weaker on.
Everyday we run revision classes. The idea for these is to give you a bit of structure when it comes to your revision because we get how difficult it can be to start. Low motivation and an overwhelming amount of topics would be enough to put anyone off. However, we think that having daily 15 minute revision classes is the best way to add structure. There's no daunting hours and hours of maths. There's no searching aimlessly online for videos and questions. We keep it simple and make it easy. So if you're struggling with a few topics and would benefit from having a daily class hosted by our tutors that you can join whenever suits you, we'd say this si by far the easiest and the most effective way to revise for GCSE Maths exams!
Need us to summarise?
We've covered a lot. So let's summarise it: 1 - make a list of topics you're good at. Tackle these first to build up a strong foundation.
2 - get to know the most common topics. This will massively help in the exam as they come up all the time!
3 - use revision classes and tools to cover and learn the topics you're weaker on. These can be daunting and overwhelming to tackle alone so consider getting some help with these to make it a little easier and make you're revision more effective :)
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