How to revise for an exam in a week with practice quizzes

A week is enough time to revise for most exams, if you spend it on the right things. The common plan of rereading every chapter and highlighting it again feels safe and works poorly. This guide shows how to revise for an exam in a week using the two techniques with the strongest evidence behind them, testing yourself and spacing your study out, and uses Study Shot to make the testing quick: you photograph a page and get up to 20 practice questions on it.

The two rules behind the plan

Test, do not reread. A large review of study techniques by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated practice testing as highly useful and rereading and highlighting as low. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), rereading won on a test five minutes later, but testing won clearly after two days and after a week, which is the gap that matters for an exam.

Space it out. The same review rated spreading study over several days as highly useful. Seeing a topic on Monday and again on Thursday beats seeing it twice on Monday. As the researchers put it in another review, The Power of Testing Memory, tests are not only for measuring learning; they produce it.

Before day one: list and split

Write down every topic on the exam, using the syllabus or your teacher's list. Split them into three roughly equal groups, A, B and C. Gather the key pages for each: textbook pages, your notes and any whiteboard photos. That is all the preparation you need.

How to revise for an exam in a week: the seven-day plan

Day 1, group A: read each key page once, properly. Then photograph it in Study Shot and do a quiz. Note your grade.
Day 2, group B: same as day 1. Finish by retaking one group A quiz you scored lowest on.
Day 3, group C: same again. Retake the weakest group B quiz.
Day 4, repair day: open your library. For every quiz on Getting there or Needs another try, go through Look at these again and reread only those parts of the page. Then retake.
Day 5, mixed retakes: retake one quiz from each group, in a mixed order. Switching topics is harder, and closer to an exam.
Day 6, without the options: for each topic, close everything and write out what you know, or do past papers if you have them. Multiple choice is easier than recall, so this is the honest check.
Day 7, light: retake only the quizzes still below Good, look over your missed-question lists, and sleep properly.

A worked example: a geography exam with nine topics

Say your geography exam covers nine topics: rivers, coasts, weather, climate, population, cities, development, resources and ecosystems. Here is how the plan looks in practice.

Before day one: you split them into A (rivers, coasts, weather), B (climate, population, cities) and C (development, resources, ecosystems). For each topic you pick the two textbook pages that matter most.
Days 1 to 3: each day you read six pages once and make six quizzes of 12 questions. That is about an hour a day. By the end of day 3 you have 18 quizzes in your library, each with a grade.
Day 4: your library shows four quizzes still on Getting there: two on coasts, one on climate and one on resources. You go through Look at these again on each, reread only those paragraphs, and retake all four. Three move up to Good.
Day 5: you retake one quiz from each group in a mixed order: cities, then rivers, then ecosystems. The coasts quiz that stayed on Getting there gets another go.
Day 6: you do one past paper with the book closed, then mark it. Your weakest answer is on coasts again, so that is the one topic you look at on day 7.

Without the quizzes you would probably have spent the week rereading all nine topics evenly. With them, you found the one topic that needed extra time by day 4.

Getting the most from each quiz

Choose the writer to suit the day. For a page you find hard, use Opus 5.5 for "Deeper questions". For a page you mostly know, Sonnet 5.5 is "Faster. Great for quick review." A retake reuses the saved questions, so the choice only matters when you make a new quiz.
Read every explanation, including on questions you got right. A lucky guess is not knowledge.
Read the results by level. Study Shot scores beginner, intermediate and advanced questions separately. Missing beginner questions means you need the facts; missing advanced ones means you need practice applying them.
Check anything surprising against the textbook. The questions are written by an AI model and are usually right, but your course material is the authority.

If you have less than a week

The same two rules hold; you just compress the spacing. With three days, split the topics into two groups instead of three:

Day 1: read and quiz group A in the morning, group B in the afternoon.
Day 2: go through Look at these again for every quiz below Good, reread only those parts, and retake in the evening.
Day 3: write out what you know without the options, then retake only the quizzes still below Good.

With one evening, do not try to cover everything evenly. Quiz yourself on the topics most likely to come up, read the explanations for every miss, and spend what time is left on those misses. A short, honest look at what you do not know is worth more than a long reread of what you do.

And next time, start a week out. The plan above takes about an hour a day, which is less than most people spend rereading.

What to skip

Skip rewriting your notes neatly, highlighting, and rereading chapters you already scored Mastered on. They feel productive and take time you need for the topics you are still Getting there on. Skip all-nighters too, especially the night before: you need to be awake and clear in the exam itself.

You can make up to ten new quizzes every ten minutes, so photographing a whole topic group in one sitting is not a problem.

Frequently asked questions

How many hours a day should I revise in the last week?

The plan here takes about an hour a day per subject. Short, focused sessions of testing and fixing gaps do more than long sessions of rereading.

Should I study the night before the exam?

Keep it light. Look over your missed-question lists and retake only the quizzes still below Good, then stop and sleep.

What if I run out of time for some topics?

Quiz yourself on every topic at least once, even briefly. A quick quiz shows you which topics are already fine, so you can spend the time you have left on the ones that are not.

Are multiple-choice quizzes enough on their own?

No. They are fast for finding gaps, but recognising the right answer is easier than recalling it. Finish with written answers or past papers, as in day 6.

Get started

Try Study Shot: photograph the page you are studying tonight and get up to 20 questions on it, from beginner to advanced.