How to plan revision for exams

List every exam with a date and a rough scope

Start with the exams themselves: date, subject, and a rough sense of how much material each one covers. An exam covering a full semester and one covering three weeks of material are not the same planning problem, even if they fall on the same day.

Set an hour target per exam

Attach a number of study hours to each exam, based on its scope and how comfortable you already are with the material, not a generic figure copied from somewhere else. This target is what turns a date into something measurable: without it, you can only track days remaining, not whether you are actually on pace.

Work backward from the exam date to today

Divide the target hours across the days between now and the exam, weighted toward the days you actually have free rather than spread evenly on a calendar. A target of 20 hours over two weeks is around 1.5 hours a day if you study every day, or closer to 3 hours on the days you actually have available if your week is uneven, which it usually is.

Give exams inside the next ten days priority

Once an exam is close, it should start winning time over lower-urgency work even if another subject "deserves" attention on a rotation. A ten-day window is a reasonable point to start treating an exam as the priority regardless of what else is on the schedule, since there is no longer enough runway left to recover from skipped sessions.

Interleave subjects instead of blocking one at a time

Studying one subject exclusively for days at a time feels efficient but tends to produce a familiarity with the material that doesn't hold up under exam conditions. Splitting time across subjects within the same week, even when one exam is closer than the others, tends to hold up better than long uninterrupted blocks on a single topic.

Recheck the target as the exam approaches

1. Compare hours studied against the target every few days, not just once at the start.
2. If you're behind, shorten the runway rather than the target: increase daily hours or reduce time on lower-priority subjects, instead of quietly lowering what "done" means for the exam.
3. If you're ahead, that hour target can safely move to whichever exam is now the one with the least slack.

This is the same structure Vitae's Exam Mode is built around: a date, a subject, a target number of hours, and days remaining, hours studied, hours left and a daily target computed from that as sessions are logged. It also feeds directly into the app's daily recommendation, so an exam that has drifted behind its target surfaces on its own rather than needing a manual check. For the broader question of building a week around several subjects and commitments rather than one exam at a time, see how to plan a study week.