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GCSE ADVISE FOR CLASS OF 2025/current year 10s

This is a copy and paste from a group chat i have with some yr 10 friends so if there are teacher names from my school, ignore them

Website, resources and youtube channel names will be highlighted in orange

More subject specific advise on my GCSE rambles masterlist

#gcse #gcses #gcse 2024 #gcses 2024 #gcses 2025 #gcse 2025 #class of 2025 #class of 2024 #advise #studyblr #school #exam #exams #revision #gcse tips #gcse advise

If I can only stress one piece of advice, it's: DO YOUR NOTES AT THE END OF A TOPIC! I didn't do that for the first term of the year (despite half my teachers advising me to), and it took me ages to catch up on everything. So incorporate it into your revision, and whether you type them, handwrite them, or anything else, just do them!

If you're starting the GCSE course this year and want to chat about it, my inbox is always open and you can send me a message if you want! <3

Transcript under the cut!

𝟐𝟏:𝟎𝟕 | 𝐨𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫

here are some clips from my post on my studygram and these summary pages took a decade at least oml

#aesthetic study #aesthetic notes #study #study blog #study motivation #studyblr #studying #studyspo #back to school #100 days of productivity #productivity #study with me #gcse organisation #business gcse #gcse tips #gcse #study notes

✽ how i revised english literature gcse

✽ analysis tables

these are 100% the most time consuming yet most useful things i’ve ever done. i basically create a table with columns for lines, features and analysis and then i either rewrite or copy and paste each individual line depending on where my source is (online or a physical book.) although rewriting the entire book is time consuming, it really is 100% worth it especially if you want to have a close analysis of everything. i found these so helpful at gcse as it meant all my notes were in one place and i had the freedom to write as much analysis as i wanted to without running out of room like i would in a book.

✽ study guides

these were also useful. i would take the main points and fill an A4 sheet of paper with everything that was essential to know, from context to characters to themes and i could look at them the morning of the exam and use that to bounce the key details before i went in.

✽ mindmaps

mindmaps i found were particularly helpful when i was trying to visualise a book or poem. i would create sections for a timeline of the book and sections to put the most important quotes or quotes relating to a theme or character.

✽ essay plans

i found writing multiple essays to be a complete waste of time. instead i opted to create essay plans which meant i could cover more questions quickly and easily and save my actual essays for tests or the real exam. it saved time and a lot of hand cramp and was very useful.

✽ flashcards

i mainly used flashcards to remember context or plot points such as the year a certain book was written. i’d go through them regularly to make sure i wasn’t forgetting any context.

✽ quote post it notes

english literature gcses are mostly closed book exams which means you need to remember quotes. i tried to pick out at least 9 quotes for each theme or character and remember them, as well as key quotes from the whole book. this helped me condense the amount of quotes i had to memorise

#english #literature #gcse tips #studying #study #studyblr #revise #revision

Introduction

With mocks all over now and the run up for GCSEs well underway in my school and many others, it’s got me thinking about last year when I was in this position like all the year 11s this year. I remember it being such a stressful and quite obscure thing because I had never done external exams before and I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought I would share some of my own experiences and advice and maybe quash some myths. I hope this will help and if anyone has anymore advice or specific questions feel free to message me or add a comment below.

Also while I will be focusing on GCSEs because they are exams that I have experience with, a lot of this advice will apply to other exams so don’t be put off!

*disclaimer*

these are just my own experiences with GCSEs and therefore are by no means universal. I have tried to draw from the experiences of friends and other people I know as well but everybody is unique so not everyone is going to be the same. BECAUSE OF THIS, not all of the advice will suit you and the way you learn. But I would suggest that you try at least a few of the tips just to see if it works.

Mocks - What do I do with them?

By this point, I think everyone will have done their GCSE mocks and probably have their grades back for them. Mocks were a very stressful experience for me because I hurt my hand literally the night before my first exam so I could barely write and I was in a lot of pain for the whole week of doing them. Because of this, I got very very stressed and then started to get worried that the same thing would happen in my GCSEs.

This leads me into my first point mocks are not the real thing: they are very much a trial run and I would say that nothing can really compare to the real exams. By the time you get to your second or third actual GCSE exam you reach a point where you don’t even think about the actual process of all the stuff you have to do before the exam because you are so focussed on the information. Furthermore, if you get grades that you are disappointed with, try not to be worried by that because they, in the grand scheme of things, do not matter

Do - learn from where you went wrong

Don’t - see a mock grade and get stressed out that you are going to fail the whole subject at GCSE

I know this is very easy to say but genuinely lots of people I know went up at least one grade from their mocks. Your mock grade is not an iron clad prediction of what you will get at GCSE

Now that you have got your grade, what do you do with the exam???

First, all of my teachers gave us back the paper to look through and then went through the mark scheme for each questions. THIS WAS SO SO HELPFUL!

If you get the paper, and you get a bad grade or one that is lower than what you were expecting, this is what I would you suggest you do:

Take a deep breath

Remember that this is only your mock grade not the final thing

Resolve yourself to actually learn from this

Read through the paper: did you make a silly mistakes? Did you keep making the same mistakes? Was there a particular question and topic that you lost lots of marks on?

Make notes on the mistakes

Ask the teacher to either give you the mark scheme or through the paper with you - I personally found this really useful because a lot of the time you can use the mark scheme to make notes for each topic and write processes, definitions, etc, using exactly what they want

Make a list of the topics that you found particularly difficult so that these can be your priority for revision

Key point - use your mocks as the spring board for your revision. They are there to point out any weak areas of your knowledge.

Pre-Study Leave Revision - “I haven’t done anything!”

After mocks I planned to get very serious with revision. I was going to dedicate 5 hours a week for all my revision during school time. In the Easter holidays i was going to stick to my revision timetable and I was going to do 6 hours a day. I was going to finish all of my notes for all of my subjects by the end of the Easter holidays.

I did not manage to do ANY OF THAT

My biggest advice for revision before study leave is to give yourself a break. Remember that you are still in school and are in probably the most stressful school year you’ve had yet.

You need to prioritise your studying and use your time wisely rather than put impossible standards on yourself which only make you more stressed when you can’t achieve them.

What should your priorities be:

Do you have any exams before study leave starts? If so, dedicate a little bit of time each weekend to revise that. For me, these were my German and French oral exams and these were the exams people in my school got most stressed about so make sure you’ve had plenty of practise

HOMEWORK!!! This may seem odd because at this point you may be thinking that your teachers shouldn’t be giving you homework and should just let you revise, but actually the homework they give, in my experience, can be really helpful. It is basically revision but you also know that someone is probably going to check whether you’ve done it so you’re more likely to actually do it

If you have time, but DON’T stress yourself trying to make time, do some past papers or make some notes

Revision Techniques: Past Papers vs Notes

Which method is better?

Honestly, neither. In fact you need to use a mixture of both to get the best out of your revision.

Note Taking

Pros:

writing out information is a good way to learn it

you need to know the information at least vaguely to properly be able to do past papers

it’s more studyblr aesthetic

Cons:

it’s very time consuming

you could be focusing more on making the notes look pretty than actually absorbing the information

there is the danger that you could spend so much time learning the information that you don’t actually have time to practise exam technique

Past Papers

Pros:

exam technique and learning to recognise what the question is asking for is really really important

you need to be able to practise doing the papers under timed conditions

you can start to see trends in the types of questions that they put on the papers

Cons:

they’re pretty difficult to do if you don’t know the information

sometimes it can feel like you are just answering questions rather than actually learning and revising

it’s a lot harder to refer back to the past papers to check information

As you can see, there are pros and cons to both so you can’t just rely on one method to get you through exams. here’s how I combined the two to maximise my revision:

I downloaded/printed off the specification for each of my subjects

I went through all of my class notes to see if there were any gaps in my class notes compared to the specification - if there were I would use my textbooks to make notes on it

Go through the specification again. Rank (eg through traffic light colours) each sub-topic on how confident you feel with it. [note: think carefully about this one and actually be honest with yourself. It’s very easy to just think you don’t know anything and make it all red- but in reality you are going to know quite a lot)

Make notes on your worst topics. And try to make notes in a way that is actually constructive and lays it out in a way that you can conceptualise it more. For example, in chemistry, I just could not ‘rates of reaction’ to click. It was one of the easiest topics but for some reason I could never answer the questions right so I make a mind map (before I had just written bullet points) and condensed my notes to one A4 page so I could refer to one the most important pieces of information.

Once you have finished making notes on your worst topics, do two past papers without any notes

Go through the past papers completely with the mark scheme. In a different colour pen to the one you wrote with, actually write the answers from the mark scheme on the past papers

Then, make your notes for the topics from the past paper mark schemes. For example, in biology, which has loads of content to learn, I would write processes, such as protein synthesis and generic experiments, using all of the key words given in the mark scheme. This meant that I always would hit all the key marks

Repeat this for each past paper you do and eventually you will see that you are no longer losing marks

Why this works:

You are making sure you know enough before starting the past papers

You are practising exam technique

You are making notes on the gaps in your knowledge using exactly what examiners want- which means lots of marks

Because you are doing lots of past papers, you can start to see themes and trends in past papers and the types questions that come up all the time

Study Leave

before my study leave, I didn’t think I would get much work done because I had been so bad at doing work and focusing on revision In half term and Easter but here’s a little bit of reassurance if you are thinking along the same lines as I was: study leave is completely different to a half term

I’m not entirely sure what exactly makes it so different but for me and pretty much everyone I know, it wasn’t actually that difficult to revise and stay focused during study leave. Maybe it’s because all you really have to think about are GCSEs or maybe it’s the sort of adrenaline of exam season but I was able to be more focused than I have ever been before.

Here’s my tips to help you:

Stay off your phone: you can either use an app like forest to make sure you stay off your phone during revision time or just turn it off completely

Prioritise your study schedule: there is no point studying for a biology exam that you have in three weeks if you have a history exam this week

Prioritise your studying: there is no point studying a topic that you already know like the palm of your hand if there are three other topics that you are not sure on

Stay hydrated and well fed: have healthy study snacks and lots of water. Also don’t feel bad if you need some more unhealthy snacks As a treat after exams or after finishing a particularly long day

Get a good night sleep as often as possible: taking GCSEs is extremely tiring. I can’t tell you the number of times I came home after a long day or week of exams and just completely wiped out. So it’s really important to sleep as much as possible even though I know pulling that all nighter is very tempting

Lean on your friends and others in your year: everyone is going through the same thing and there is also going to be someone who can help you. I found GCSEs to be one of the most uniting experiences in my school life

Summary

Use mocks to find the gaps in your knowledge

Before study leave, don’t set unrealistic revision goals, instead focus on completing homework

During study leave, use a mixture of notes taking and past papers to revise

Use past paper marks schemes to guide your notes

Prioritise your studying during study leave

Sleep well and stayed healthy

I hope this was helpful and if anyone has any other questions or more tips feel free to reblog or send me an ask/message

- Sophie x

i’m coming to the end of my GCSE course now, and am beginning to almagamte all my notes into revision folders and organise them so i thought i’d give some people some general tips for starting out gcses.

organise your folders!! make sure you get plastic wallets (without them your works gets all ripped and ruined - don’t even get me started on rain), and dividers for different topics of work. it’s so useful to know your notes are all organised and kept in one place. also lots of subjects have a lot more work than you’d imagine so get a lever arch folder not a ring binder.

make your notes pretty. i know it sounds stupid as hell but i hate looking at old notes and attempting to revise from them cos they’re so messy and i can’t tell what’s notes and what isn’t. buy highlighters (i recommend pastel they’re pretty) and different coloured pens. also if your notes are pretty it makes u want to revise more.

everyone says ‘make your revision resources early so you don’t have to make them in year 11 before your exams’ but i wouldn’t listen too much to that. most of my revision resources in year 9 are awful, and don’t help much when revising from them. use the earlier times as a way to experiment with what works and what doesn’t, rather than them being your consolidated final product for your real exams.

revise! for! mocks! if you don’t revise, you’ll do badly - simple as, and if you do badly across the board you’ll have no clue which topics you’re bad at and which ones you’re good at. if you revise and do badly, you know you need to go over that again next time and will hopefully improve. (also if you miss your real gcses your mock grades are used so these exams are still important)

finally if you do a creative subject - keep on top of your coursework. it’s so much work and if you fall behind you will not be able to catch up so keep on top of it. use weekends to catch up and dedicate a day or two in holidays for coursework. (i know it sounds awful but if you work slowly you need to dedicate time for it)

ok so those are my main tips - feel free to add any more if you come up with them. and idk how exams work in other countries but these tips should be transferable :)

#gcses #gcse #gcses 2020 #gcse tips #exams #exam tips #school #school tips

tips for year 10

since i’ve finished year ten and am just starting year 11, i thought i’d offer some advice for those of you starting year 10:

1. make your notes as you go along - it’s so much easier to revise effectively when you’ve already made resources, instead of wasting revision time making notes. this also means that you have notes ready when you go into year 11.

2. ask questions - when you have a question, write it down and ask your teacher next lesson. not only does this make sure that you know the content while you’re learning it, it helps you become more involved in your subjects and shows your teacher that you’re willing to take initiative and learn for yourself.

3. use revision resources - i would recommend getting revision guides (e.g. the cgp books) in year 10 and using them to guide your revision throughout the year. if you don’t want to write on the books until year 11 then you can use a separate notebook to answer the questions.

4. REVISE FOR YOUR EXAMS - i cannot emphasise the importance of this enough. if revise and work for exams in year 10 then you’ll have already started learning the content that you’ll need to know in year 11. this means that you don’t have to revise as intensely for year 11 mocks and eventually your acutal gcses.

5. if you regret your options, switch while you can - some schools may not do this, but in my school we have a four week grace period at the start of year 10 where we can try out our option choices and change them if we want to. if you have a few lessons and find out that one of your subjects actually isn’t for you, see what you can do about switching to something you find easier/more fun/more interesting. i find that enjoying a subject will motivate me to work hard at it, so it’s super important to be studying things you enjoy.

6. concentrate in lessons - it may seem that as your gcses are in a year, you don’t need to work hard or concentrate in your lessons, but please don’t be the person who has to learn everything in year 11. it’s likely that you won’t revisit your year 10 topics in depth in year 11, so concentrate and learn them while the teacher is teaching you.

7. seek help if you need it - year 10 can be a pretty stressful time, what with a new course, new teachers, new classes and a bigger workload. if you feel like you need help, be it with academic problems, physical health or mental health, please please please ask for help. there is absolutely no shame in asking someone to help you, and it will honestly make everything easier.

8. enjoy yourself - i know this is a generic thing that everyone says, but enjoying yourself and having fun is really important. join clubs, hang out with friends, make the most of having more privileges within school without the stress of gcse exams. as well as a place of learning, school should also be somewhere you can make lasting friendships, memories and have loads of fun.

i hope that these have helped some of you, and good luck to everyone starting year 10, you’ll smash it! xx

#studyblr #study tips #studying #gcse studyblr #gcses 2020 #student #study #studyspo #year 10 #year 11 #gcse advice #tips #gcse tips #peachblossomstudy

GCSE tips

(and i guess exam tips in general)

So I finished GCSEs a few weeks ago and now that I’ve had some time to come back to my senses and take a step back I feel like this might be the best time to write about them as they’re still fairly clear in my head. So, if you’re going into Year 11, here are some things I kinda wish I’d knew more ? I guess?

1. Do NOT prioritise your studies over your mental health. Honestly. It takes a massive toll and it is hard but you cannot push yourself to sit at a desk for hours every day on study leave because you WILL burn out! Even just taking the time for 5 mins of music or stretching or taking a short walk around ur area is worth it, just to let your brain have a bit of a break.

2. that being said, don’t use your breaks to go on your phone. Before you know it, the whole day will have gone by - seriously. Using screentime limits or Study Timer (on App Store, it’s basically an app for the pomodoro method - you do 25mins of work and get 5 mins to have a break, p simple) is a good way to avoid just lounging around your phone

3. don’t beat yourself up! you ARE good at your subjects, you DO know your stuff. It feels like you’re faking everything but don’t worry because everyone, even if they’ve revised for hours and hours, feels like they’re improvising. Sometimes the best thing is not to compare how much revision you’ve done: I remember after I came back from Easter holidays I had a breakdown in almost every lesson because I felt like everyone had done more than me. The truth was, I had focused more time on other subjects, and they’d done ones I hadn’t got onto studying as much yet. Everyone works at different paces, as long as you feel confident when you’re working by yourself at home, it’ll be okay!

4. ofc the regular tips: DO PRACTICE PAPERS! seriously, they’re the best help you can get. ask your teachers to mark extra essays or at least help you plan them. utilise school resources! trade revision resources w friends!

5. speaking of friends, don’t revise w them! I know someone who had an awful easter break (revision wise) bc she thought she could revise w friends. She’d go to the same library half the year went to and none of then ended up doing work. Don’t do that! Obviously, once you’ve learnt the content, you can do quickfire Q&A stuff but spending more than a short amount of time means you will get distracted and won’t be efficient in your revision

6. when you’re timetabling, make sure you leave large blanks bc sometimes there are gonna be days when you can’t force anything into your head and if you’re on a super cramped timetable, you’re gonna fall behind very quickly. sometimes, instead of a full timetable, it’s good to just work in to do lists.

7. try not to get addicted to a tv show. like, many people do, but honestly speaking from experience don’t recommend

8. start getting a good sleeping pattern earlier in the year! it will help you come exam time!! & don’t pull all nighters, it DOESNT help. Trust me! It’s literally been proven scientifically that an hour of sleep compared to an hour of revision before an exam can help you retain more information. If you’re sleepy, you’re not going to be at peak performance

9. as soon as the exam is done, PUT IT OUT OF YOUR HEAD! that’s it! nothing can be done! if it was awful, don’t worry, you have time for the second paper & if it was hard, i’m sure lots of other people found it hard too

10. don’t compare your grades to others. everyone is working to their own goals. just because you’re not great at maths and your friend is predicted an A* grade doesn’t mean you should be judging yourself for it! Everyone has their own strengths! Also, if someone is complaining about a lot of pressure being put onto then because of high predicted grades, don’t get angry bc “they shouldn’t be complaining, their predicted grades are high” - everyone has different standards and different pressures so it’s unfair of you to judge them for their goals just as it’s unfair of them to judge you for yours.

#thats all i have for now #might add more in later?#idk if this is helpful #but if u wanna ask me anything abt revision for gcses go ahead #or just anything abt Y11 in general #academia #dark academia #studyblr #study #gcses #Gcse #revision #exams #exam tips #gcse tips #mine