5 Revision Mistakes GCSE Students Make (And How to Fix Them)

Most GCSE students spend hours revising. The problem is not effort — it is method. Research consistently shows that the most popular revision techniques are also the least effective. A landmark review by Dunlosky et al. (2013) evaluated ten common study strategies and found that the ones students use most — re-reading and highlighting — were rated “low utility” for learning.

Here are five revision mistakes that waste your time, and what to do instead.

1. Re-Reading Notes Passively

This is the most common revision mistake, and arguably the most damaging. You sit down with your notes, read through them, and feel like you are learning. The information looks familiar. You recognise the diagrams. You can follow the explanations. So you move on, confident that you know it.

But you do not. Not really.

Why it fails: Re-reading creates what psychologists call a “fluency illusion.” Your brain confuses recognition (this looks familiar) with recall (I can reproduce this from memory). In the exam, you need recall. You need to write down definitions, explain processes, and apply concepts to unfamiliar scenarios — all from memory. Re-reading does not prepare you for this.

Roediger and Karpicke (2006) demonstrated this clearly. Students who re-read a passage performed well on an immediate test but poorly a week later. Students who tested themselves — even just once — retained significantly more over time. The act of retrieving information strengthens memory in a way that passive review simply cannot match.

The fix: Replace re-reading with retrieval practice. After studying a topic, close your notes and write down everything you can remember. Use a blank piece of paper, a whiteboard, or even just talk through it out loud. Then check your notes to see what you missed. Focus your next study session on the gaps.

This feels harder than re-reading, and that is exactly the point. The difficulty is what makes it effective. If revision feels easy, you are probably not learning much.

2. Highlighting Everything

Walk into any school library during revision season and you will see textbooks glowing with highlighter. Yellow, pink, green — sometimes all three on the same page. Students highlight key terms, definitions, dates, and formulas, creating a colourful but ultimately useless revision strategy.

Why it fails: Highlighting is passive. You are reading and marking text, but you are not engaging with it at a meaningful level. You are not asking yourself why something matters, how it connects to other topics, or whether you could explain it without looking. Dunlosky’s 2013 review rated highlighting as “low utility” because it does not promote deeper processing of the material.

Worse, highlighting gives you a false sense of progress. You look at your colourful textbook and think, “I have covered all of this.” But covering is not learning.

The fix: Instead of highlighting, create questions from your notes. Turn each key point into a question that you will answer later without looking. For example, instead of highlighting “mitosis has four stages: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase,” write a question: “What are the four stages of mitosis and what happens in each?”

If you must highlight, use it sparingly and only as a first step. Highlight the key points, then turn those highlights into flashcards or practice questions. The highlighting itself is not the revision — it is the starting point.

3. Only Studying Your Favourite Subjects

This one is human nature, and it is devastating to grades. Students gravitate towards the subjects they enjoy and avoid the ones they find difficult. Maths feels good when you are getting questions right. History feels productive when you are reading an interesting chapter. Meanwhile, the subjects you are struggling in — the ones where revision actually matters most — get pushed to tomorrow. And tomorrow. And the day after.

Why it fails: The subjects you enjoy are probably the ones where you are already performing well. Spending three hours on them might move you from a grade 7 to a grade 8 in one subject. But spending those same three hours on a subject where you are at a grade 4 could move you to a grade 6 — a much bigger improvement that could affect your college applications, sixth form options, or simply your overall point score.

This is a classic example of diminishing returns. The weaker the subject, the more room for improvement, and the more impact each hour of revision has.

The fix: Start every revision session with your weakest subject. Not your favourite. Not the easiest. The one you have been avoiding. Spend at least 30 minutes on it before you allow yourself to move on. You can reward yourself with a favourite subject afterwards, but the hard work comes first.

Better yet, use data to guide your decisions. If you have done practice papers or mock exams, look at where you lost the most marks. Those are the topics that deserve your time. Your feelings about a subject are not a reliable guide to where you need to focus — your results are.

4. Not Using Past Papers

Some students treat past papers as something to save for the very end of revision — a final test once they have “learned everything.” Others avoid them entirely because getting questions wrong feels discouraging. Both approaches miss the point.

Why it fails: Past papers are not just a test of what you know. They are one of the most powerful revision tools available. Research on the testing effect shows that practising retrieval under realistic conditions — which is exactly what past papers provide — strengthens memory more effectively than almost any other technique.

Past papers also teach you things that notes and textbooks cannot:

How examiners phrase questions (which is often different from how your teacher explains things)
How to manage your time across a full paper
What command words like “evaluate,” “analyse,” and “compare” actually require
How mark schemes allocate marks (two marks usually means two distinct points)

If you are not doing past papers, you are revising the content but not the exam.

The fix: Start using past papers early — not in the final week, but as part of your regular revision. You do not need to sit a full paper every time. Start with individual questions on specific topics. Look at the mark scheme afterwards and compare your answer to what the examiner wanted. Pay attention to where you lost marks and why.

Once you are closer to exams, do full timed papers under exam conditions. No notes, no phone, strict time limits. This builds the stamina and time management skills you need on the day. Most exam boards — AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC — publish past papers and mark schemes for free on their websites. There is no excuse not to use them.

5. Starting Revision Too Late

“I work better under pressure” is the most common justification for late revision, and it is almost always wrong. What students actually mean is “I work only under pressure” — and the research shows that last-minute pressure produces worse results, not better.

Why it fails: Effective revision techniques — spaced repetition, retrieval practice, interleaving — all require time to work. Spaced repetition, by definition, involves reviewing material at increasing intervals over weeks or months. If you start two weeks before exams, there is simply not enough time for the technique to do its job. You end up cramming, which creates short-term familiarity but weak long-term retention.

Cepeda et al. (2006) found that the optimal gap between study sessions depends on how long you need to remember the material. For an exam in three months, spacing reviews about a week apart is effective. For an exam in one week, there is barely time for a single review cycle.

Starting late also increases stress, which impairs memory formation and recall. Cortisol, the stress hormone, interferes with the hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for forming new memories. So not only do you have less time to revise, but your brain is less efficient at retaining what you study.

The fix: Start revision early and do a little consistently, rather than a lot at the last minute. A practical approach:

4+ months before exams: Begin reviewing core topics once a week. Focus on building understanding and identifying gaps.
2-3 months before: Increase frequency. Use spaced repetition to cycle through all topics at appropriate intervals.
1 month before: Shift to past papers and timed practice. Focus on exam technique and weak areas.
Final week: Light review only. No new material. Focus on sleep, nutrition, and confidence.

Even 15 minutes per subject per day, started early, will outperform hours of panicked cramming the night before.

The Common Thread

All five of these mistakes share a common trait: they feel productive but are not. Re-reading feels like studying. Highlighting looks like progress. Favourite subjects feel rewarding. Avoiding past papers feels safe. Starting late feels manageable. But none of them translate into better exam performance.

The revision techniques that actually work — retrieval practice, spaced repetition, past paper practice, focusing on weak areas — feel harder. They expose what you do not know. They require planning. They demand consistency. But they are backed by decades of research, and they produce results.

UpGrades is built around these evidence-based techniques. Every practice session uses retrieval practice. Topics are scheduled using spaced repetition. The system identifies your weakest areas and prioritises them, so you spend your time where it matters most. You do not have to manage the science yourself — you just have to show up and practise.

The students who get the best results are not always the smartest or the most hard-working. They are the ones who revise effectively. Fix these five mistakes, and you are already ahead of most of your year group.

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