Exam season · 3 August 2026 · 8 min read
The 12-week physics revision timetable that actually holds
Every January, students build beautiful revision timetables. By February, most are abandoned. The problem is never discipline — it is design: timetables fail because they are built for an imaginary student with infinite evenings and no bad days. Here is the 12-week structure I have refined across thirty years, built for real students with school, homework and a life.
The three rules that keep it alive
Before the schedule, the rules that make it survivable:
- —Plan five days a week, not seven. The two spare days absorb the bad weeks. A timetable with no slack shatters the first time life happens.
- —Sessions of 45 minutes, one topic each. Two sessions on a school evening, four on a weekend day, is sustainable. Marathon days are not.
- —Every session produces something checkable: a page of notes rewritten from memory, a marked past-paper question, a quiz score. If you cannot point at what a session produced, it did not happen.
Weeks 1–6: coverage
One topic per session, straight through the syllabus — mechanics first, then thermal, waves, electricity, atomic. For each topic: read the revision notes, rewrite the definitions and equations from memory, then do one past-paper question on that topic and mark it against the real mark scheme.
The memory rewrite is the step students skip and the step that matters most. Reading feels like learning; retrieval is learning. The free topic notes on this site are structured for exactly this — definitions in mark-scheme wording, equations with units, the traps listed.
Weeks 7–10: past papers by paper type
Switch from topics to papers. Alternate: one session of theory paper questions, one of multiple choice done fast, one of Paper 6 (or practical-paper) technique. Always timed, always marked honestly, always with a list of marks lost and why.
Keep a single page titled 'where my marks die'. After every marked paper, add to it. By week ten, that page is a personal syllabus — and weeks eleven and twelve exist to work through it.
Keep one page titled 'where my marks die'. By week ten, it is your personal syllabus.
Weeks 11–12: the sharpening
No new material. Work the weak-list, redo the questions you got wrong a fortnight ago, and rewrite the formula sheet from memory twice a week until it is automatic. Protect normal sleep in the final week: recall and decision-making suffer when revision consistently replaces rest.
Students inside my course get this structure enforced for them: weekly homework, regular exams, and someone checking the marking honesty. If self-enforcement is the part that fails you — and it fails most students — that is what the course is for.