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 its worked answer to mark against.

Practise choosing the method, not just running it

A maths exam almost never tells you which technique to use. That decision is most of the difficulty, and a chapter's worth of questions in a row removes it: by question three you are running the method the heading named rather than choosing it. So once a topic is secure, practise it mixed in with others. The question player will draw across units for exactly this reason, and the mixing is the point rather than a convenience.

Twenty minutes a day, and let the gaps do the work

Fluency decays, and returning to something just as it fades is what makes it stick. Twenty minutes on most days beats a five-hour Sunday for that reason. The day planner runs the 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 in the wording that scores

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.

Write proofs as a sequence somebody else could check

Proof marks are given for structure as much as for the algebra. State what you are assuming, say which method you are using, keep every line following from the one above, and finish with a sentence that answers the question that was asked. Induction needs its base case, its assumption and its conclusion written out; a proof by contradiction needs the negation stated before anything is derived from it. The proof unit sets out each structure in the order a marker reads it.

Check the domain before you trust the answer

Squaring, taking logs, multiplying by an unknown and cancelling a factor can all create solutions that were never there, and restricted intervals, calculator mode and the sign of a square root all discard answers that were. Substituting back is the cheapest check in the subject, and a sketch settles how many solutions an interval should contain before you count the ones you found.

Sort your errors by type, not by date

Keep the questions you got wrong and group them by what went wrong: sign slips, mishandled fractions, a misread question, the wrong method chosen, a method run incorrectly. The groups are usually far smaller than the pile, and each one has a different fix. Rate yourself on the revision checklist the same way and spend your evenings at the bottom of the list: marks lost on vectors count the same as marks lost anywhere else, and they are usually easier to win back.

What feels like work but is not

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 a full worked answer, on the topics you avoid, is the one that moves a grade.

Everything linked above is free and works without an account. If you take one thing from this page: start from a blank page more often, and find the exact line where your working and the worked answer part company.