How to revise

How to revise A-level maths

Maths is the subject where revision advice is simplest and most ignored: you get better at doing questions by doing questions. What follows is the order that works, and the traps that feel like work but are not.

Doing beats watching, every time

Watching a worked solution feels like understanding, but the exam never asks you to watch anything. The test of a topic is whether you can start a question from a blank page, get stuck, and work through the stuckness. Read a topic once, then go straight to questions: every lesson here ends with a workbook of original questions with full worked answers, and the question player runs the same bank one question at a time with the scheme to mark against.

Little and often beats heroic and rare

Twenty minutes a day, most days, beats a five-hour Sunday, because fluency decays and the fix is returning to things just as they fade. The day planner runs that schedule for you: a topic to read, the flashcards that are due, and questions sized to the time you give it.

Know what the formulae booklet will not give you

The Edexcel booklet prints a lot, but the results students actually lose marks on are the ones it leaves out: the exact trig values, the double angle formulae in the forms you use them, the derivatives you are expected to know cold. The formulae page separates what the booklet prints from what you have to carry, so nothing you memorise is wasted.

Algebra is the exam technique

Most dropped marks in A-level maths are not conceptual. They are sign slips, mishandled fractions and rushed rearrangement, and they respond to deliberate practice better than anything else in the subject. When a worked answer differs from yours, find the exact line where they part company. That line is the revision.

State things the way the scheme states them

Proof, statistics and mechanics all carry marks for wording: what a hypothesis test concludes, what mutually exclusive means, what the model assumes about a particle. The definitions page keeps the wording that scores, and the command words page decodes what each question verb is actually asking for.

Aim your time at the weakest unit

Rate yourself honestly on the revision checklist and spend your evenings at the bottom of the list. Revising your best topic is the most expensive comfort there is: marks lost on vectors cost the same as marks lost anywhere else, and they are cheaper to win back.

The traps

Copying out notes is not revision. Re-reading a chapter you already follow is not revision. Doing ten easy questions on a topic you like is barely revision. The uncomfortable version, questions you might get wrong, marked against the scheme, on the topics you avoid, is the one that moves a grade.

Everything linked above is free and works without an account. If you only take one thing from this page: answer more questions, sooner, and mark them honestly.