The road ahead

Just like the start of any good essay, I'll tell you a little bit about the plan up my sleeve for this blog. It's good to know where we're going.

Broadly speaking, your revision will comprise three steps, which will overlap considerably. They are i) researching, ii) thinking and iii) learning. In the first step, you will need to assemble notes on the entire course. In the second step, you will need to craft these into reasoned critical and original arguments or rough essay plans. In the final step, you will need to ensure all this information is on-board. Much of it will have sunk in from the first two steps but some effortful learning will be needed.

I will take you through each of these steps.

More specifically, I am going to start of with a couple of posts on what my approach to revision was. I think being clever about work and not just clever in your work is important. So I will be giving advice on how to draw up a timetable, work out what you'll need to research, and how to minimize the amount of work you do by doing less work of much greater quality. I will also discuss how you can be more effective if you work in groups both on the small level (3-5) and at the year-wide level in the research stage. In other words, I will talk about how to work smartly and not just work slavishly hard.

I'll also be doing a few things to get you excited about your degree, including some cool books to read and videos to watch. I'll put into perspective just what a good degree it is and how rich and exciting it can be if you give it a chance. If you have a bad relationship with it already, hopefully, I will be able to mend that a bit. It is imperative you start (if you don’t already) enjoying and even loving experimental psychology because it makes the whole revision process less painful. I'll also speak about the 2.1/First divide and how not to get caught on the wrong side of it.

I'll do some stuff on how to take effective notes, how to make researching your notes more enjoyable and memorable, the best conditions and places to work in, question spotting, cherry picking, dealing with a mixed literature and so on.

In the first few weeks of the summer term all this research and noting should come to an end. You'll see in the following posts I suggest creating something called the 'revision bible', a printed, polished and bound version of all your notes. As such, I will be doing a few posts around this time on formatting the bible, organising your material using some advanced features in Word to make it easier to search through and getting it printed.

After this stage, you will enter step (ii), thinking. This will involve you boiling down all your information into thoughtful answers to past and invented questions. I estimate that 90% of all the answers I gave in exams in both years I had already written in some form during my revision. All I did was tweak it to the question being asked. Therefore, I will do a few posts on how to craft your arguments from your notes.

Then as you start writing a few practice essays I will unleash a torrent of posts on how to write because writing well it such a massive part of scoring highly. This will include stuff on your writing style, composing perfect introductions and conclusions, using the right words, describing and evaluating evidence and so on.

At this point I'll probably do a few posts for stragglers on emergency revision techniques. Then for people aiming higher, I give actionable advice about how to operate within First territory by being critical and original.

Then as exams loom I'll take you through the exam day, suggesting ways to get the best out of it, conquer nerves, deal with nightmare scenarios, read the questions, plan your essay, write it and what to do after.

Finally, I am going to suffuse the whole blog with posts on lifestyle during revision, including stuff on sleep, stress, exercise and food. I'll also harness the full power of the Internet to bring you some things like music to listen to and shows to watch because revision should be about relaxing too.

I am going to avoid nostrums and where I can will back up what I say with hard scientific evidence (mostly from our own subject).

So it's a tall order; however, yours is taller. In the next post, I'll talk about that big to-do list of yours and how to approach it.