Hello! I'm writing this for the #examprepchallenge and I realise it might be late if, like me, your exams are currently happening. But hopefully it will be helpful if you still have exams in the future.
Onto the content!
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The first thing is to know the content of your course. I made a set up with lots of different styles for different types of subjects that I have studied.
In this example, we have 4 modules, or subjects, to study for. This is perfect for A levels, but can be adapted for other courses with more subjects, it might just take more pages.
I'm letting each subject take half a page, but as you can see, it is a little cramped. You could have a whole page per subject, or only a third of a page per subject, depending on your notebook and subjects.
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Acquainted, Familiar, Confident
In subjects where you have to learn concepts, definitions, proofs or methods, I like to have an Acquainted, Familiar, Confident (AFC) chart. Basically, for each concept, you mark how well you understand it and can apply it.
By the time revision period comes around, hopefully you can create a list of concepts you need to know, and can fill out this chart. It gives a wonderful visualisation of how competent you are overall with your subject.
If you start early, and don't know all the concepts yet, you can just leave it blank and fill it up later - here, I noticed that most other weeks have 3 concepts per week, so I left that much space under each week.
To make it easier to see which problem sheets I might want to practice, I alternated colours, and also gave an overall AFC score for each problem sheet.
In this spread, the concept and problem sheet AFC's are separate:
And here, we have a more artistic AFC chart, which gives you a star only when you feel confident with the concept!
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Completed tasks
For topology, I did the past papers out of order, and didn't care so much about my scores in them. For cryptography and algorithm analysis, the tutorials and workshops were tasks we had to complete.
For these, there was no confidence score to give, so instead we laid it out with different ways of checking off those tasks.
This would also be great for seeing what tasks have been done in group coursework, or large projects, like art (I don't know how art coursework is but I assume there are things that must be completed).
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Grade tracking
If you want to see your progress over time in past papers, for example, it's a good idea to space out your past paper attempts so you can see your increase in grade over time. The abstract algebra page showed grades, but this one ~visualises~ your progress.
I would recommend having goals. Even if you don't achieve them, it can motivate you to work towards them, and you can feel good in knowing that you put in your best effort. If you do achieve them, then of course, that feels really good.
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Flash cards
If you use Anki, or a flash card managing app, it may give you an estimate of which cards you've memorised for short or long term. If you don't use anything like this, then you can go with your gut feeling.
This is a bit like the AFC chart, except when the number of concepts is super large, or you want to break things into smaller chunks.
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Time scheduling
While it is great to be able to see your strengths and weaknesses in each topic laid out nicely in each page, that is kinda useless unless you actually make your desired progress in time for your exam.
For that, we need a timetable! The obvious most important part is your exam dates or coursework deadlines. However, it is also important to put in days when you will be too busy to do work! This will let you plan your time more effectively.
You can see the exams are hilighted blue, and my other commitments are hilighted pink.
Hopefully this is enough for you to see how much you need to do by your exam date, how long you have left to do the work, and such. However, if having multiple deadlines or exams makes it hard for you to judge your progress, there is still hope.
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Progress over time
I'd like to firstly warn you that it's about to get a bit ridiculous. This tetris abomination I've created is not the prettiest, and it's also quite hard to set up. However, if you want to see each day how much work you should have done, on each of your topics, visualised, then this is for you.
1. Choose a date you want to finish studying each module by, and call it the finish date for the topic. For this, I decided I should be finished with the material 3 days before the exam. In those last days, I should consolidate my learning with past papers, but mostly, take a break.
2. Write the numbers of the days you are NOT busy down the left hand side. I skipped my exam days, too, as I don't want to be overwhelmed with work if I have an exam that day as well.
3. Decide on a scoring system for the things you must do in each topic. Try to make it so that the total score for each topic is about the same as the others.
->For example, for topology, I had it so that each filled in AFC square was worth one point. For cryptography, each long term memorised flashcard was one point, and each workshop task was also one point.
->This resulted in topology having a max score of 87,
Algebra max score 81,
Algorithms max score 119 (I wish I could have made this one lower),
Cryptography max score 97.
4.
->Tip: if your total score for all topics is higher than the space available on your page, let each point be worth half a square, for example. This is what I did in the image below.
Construct a box or shape with its area equal to the total score for the topic. This shape will go next to the numbers corresponding to the days on the left. Make sure that the bottom of the shape does not go past your finish date for the module. Try to arrange these shapes so that it is approximately the same width all the way down.
All that remains is to fill in these boxes. For each point in each module, fill in a square (or half a square) in the corresponding shape. In my progress check, I colour coordinated the shapes so it is easy to see which one to fill in.
It is also a good idea to put a key at the bottom, so you know how many squares to fill for each task!
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I hope that this helped you. I know I struggled to explain the progress bar, although it was quite complicated to make... Hopefully if you understood the idea that will be enough for you to implement something similar anyway.
If you end up using anything from this post please tag me, I'd love to see it! Feel free to comment questions or send me a pm <3
Comments (2)
These spreads are amazing.. :heart_eyes: :heart: love the idea :ok_hand: :purple_heart: :purple_heart:
Reply to: Shailie Study Junction
Thank you! I tried to have variation for each topic so there's more ideas for people ^_^