DO NOT let things slide if you don't understand them. Make sure you understand them before going into new content. Do your best to understand concepts to a fundamental level and stay on top of things. You don't necessarily have to memorise everything as long as you understand it.
Knowing what exams you're doing at the start of the year sets you up and gives you a direction for the goals you want to achieve. Note down what papers you have. How long is each paper? What will each paper involve? And what will you have to know for each paper? The earlier you know what exams you will be taking, the earlier you can prepare for them.
Before class, read the textbook until you understand the knowledge at a basic level. This is almost a new consolidation of that knowledge, even if you don't write notes after every class. You'd probably have about 6 tests a year, so you could write a nice set of condensed notes about all the content as a review. Before each test look over these notes, recognize what you've forgotten and then convert these to flashcards, and memorise the flashcards. Memorising concepts is about repetition so the more times you go over it the more neuro connections form - it's that simple really!
At the end of the year when you’re studying for your exams, each subject will generally have a list of learning objectives (syllabus). Make sure you go through them and check that you understand each point. Understanding each of those learning objectives is very key so that if you know all the learning objectives at least to a primal level, you should be able to answer every question in the exam to some certain point.
It's a great way to practise, go over content from the start of the year and do past papers. You can study for it as if you're at your A-level exams, and that should set you up. Although you will be learning new content at this stage and might not have a lot of free time, you can take it as seriously as you can. Definitely DON’T do every past paper for the mock exams at once because that means you won't have any left for the end-of-year exams. When you receive your checked exam papers, critically analyse your mistakes and what you don’t know as this could highlight weaknesses you didn’t realize you had.
The way to prepare for your exam is just to do past year papers (at least the last five years) since questions often repeat themselves. Past year papers are the best resource out there as they give you an idea of what they can assess you on and how they ask questions. Practicing these papers will make you feel more comfortable when you're doing the exams because you know what to expect.
This goes against what education is all about but in the end, you don't hate the player, you hate the game. Acknowledge what key points the examiners want, and what commonalities each of them has between years and then apply that to exams. For some subjects, similar questions will have the same number of points. If you can memorise these points, every single time you get a similar question, you'll be able to get those full marks.
For example, in Math: write answers to 3 significant figures, so instead of having a piece of paper packed with content you don't know, you could have another piece of paper with exam tips you should know. Fundamental idea is that you do past year papers, and these exam tips are derived from those past papers. It's not content-based, yet it allows you to become a better exam taker.
Make sure you know everything in the textbook, and you do as many past papers as possible, so you know what each question could be. You should always aim for 100% even if you don’t think you will get 100%. If you aim for the moon and miss, you will still land among the stars. Go for the 100%, if you don't reach as most people don't, you will hopefully at least be in the 90%
Two months would be ideal to ensure you've gone through all the content and you've done the past papers. For each subject, make a list to go through each unit, then note how many years of past papers you want to do. You might spend a whole day planning for each subject, so you have everything you want to do, every content piece you want to do, and every past year you want to do. And then start with your exam date and work back from that date. If you plug it in backwards correctly, that will allow you to have a starting date of when you need to start. This is so you plan your study from when your exam is rather than from where it is now, and that sort of indicates to you when you should start or when you need to hurry up and get back on track. This tip will lay a clean smooth path up to the exam.
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