One Week Before the Exam: The Order to Go Through Your Mistakes
With a week to go, do not start a new workbook. Gather every question you got wrong on this exam’s material, re-solve them with the answers covered on days one and two, re-solve whatever you missed again on days three and four, and spend the last days on a timed run and only the questions that are still wrong.
A week is enough for two or three passes over your mistakes, and not enough to cover the material from scratch. The order below keeps each pass shorter than the last, so the final days go to the few questions that still trip you up.
In this guide
Day 1 — Gather only the mistakes, all in one place
Go through the tests, quizzes and workbook pages that cover this exam and pull out every question you got wrong, plus the ones you guessed right. Leave out the ones you answer reliably.
Keep the question, the correct answer and the worked solution together. If they are spread across three books, the gathering is what eats the week, so do it all on the first day.
Day 1 — Sort by why you got it wrong
Mark each question with one reason. Each reason needs a different fix, so this is how you decide where the week goes.
- Did not know the concept: read that section of the material once, then re-solve.
- Knew it, still got it wrong (a slip, a misread condition): re-solve, then write one line about what to check next time.
- Ran out of time: practise those under a timer later in the week.
Days 1–2 — Re-solve every mistake with the answer covered
Cover the answer and solution and work each question from a blank page. Do not read the solution first “to warm up”: that turns it into re-reading.
Check right after each question and find the first step that went wrong. Questions you now get right go in a “got it once” pile; the rest stay.
Days 3–4 — Come back to them on a different day
Re-solve the “got it once” pile and everything still wrong. Getting a question right minutes after reading its solution does not show you will get it right on exam day; getting it right two days later is better evidence.
A question you get right again can leave the pile. What remains after this pass is your real list for the last days.
Days 5–6 — A timed run, then the leftovers
Mix the remaining questions with a few you already fixed, print them or lay them out like a paper, and solve under the exam’s time limit. This is where “ran out of time” questions get their practice.
Then re-solve only the questions you missed in that run.
Day 7 — Light, and only the last few
The day before is not for new material. Re-solve the handful of questions still on the list and read your one-line notes on slips. Our separate guide on the night before an exam goes through that evening.
How ReviewNotes runs this week
Photograph the test papers or upload the PDF; the questions are split out one by one, with the answers too if the paper has them. For each one you can record why you got it wrong: a calculation slip, a concept you did not know, a misread question, running out of time, or a guess.
Solve them as a set. When you finish, you can re-solve just the ones you missed straight away, and missed questions come back in Today on later days until you get them right. In Schedule you can make a plan for this exam with its date and a daily amount, and print a set as a PDF without answers for the timed run.
Questions people ask
- I have a week left and a lot of mistakes. Should I still re-solve all of them?
- Re-solve all of them once on the first two days, but no more than that. From then on, only the ones you missed again come back, so each pass is shorter than the last.
- Should I do new practice questions or re-solve old mistakes?
- With a week left, start with your mistakes: they are the questions you have already shown you cannot answer yet. Add new questions of the same type once a mistake is fixed, to check you can do the type and have not just remembered that one answer.
- What if I get a mistake right on the first try?
- Do not drop it yet. Re-solve it again on a different day; if you get it right then too, let it go.