How to build a study planner for your exams

Without a planner, you study what is urgent or what is pleasant. The heaviest subjects, or the ones you like least, get pushed back to the last week, and that is where everything piles up.

A planner has three functions: checking that the time available is enough, spreading the work so that each subject is covered several times, and knowing each morning what there is to do without having to decide. That last point matters more than you might think: the energy spent wondering where to start is lost to studying.

Above all, a spread-out planner lets you benefit from the spacing effect: reviewing a subject several times a few days apart locks it in far better than a single intensive block (see spaced repetition).

Backward planning means starting from the deadline and working back in time. Proceed in this order:

• Write down the date and time of each exam. If your exams are spread over two weeks, each subject has its own deadline.
• Count the days really available between now and then, subtracting lectures, tutorials, placements, hospital shifts, paid work and fixed commitments.
• Take stock of the work per subject: number of chapters or handouts, cards to review, past papers to do.
• Estimate the time needed per subject, weighting by its coefficient and your current level. A high-coefficient subject where you are behind comes first.
• Spread this volume over the available days, starting from the end: the last week is reserved for final reviews and mock exams, not for learning new material.

If the total exceeds the time available, it's better to know today than ten days before the exams. You then have to sort: what is certain to come up, what earns the most points, what can be skimmed.

A balanced split avoids two traps: devoting an entire week to a single subject, then forgetting it, and leaving the heaviest subject for last.

These durations are indicative: adapt them to the length of your semester. The idea to keep is the progression: discover, practice, consolidate.

Yes. Alternating subjects or problem types within a session is called interleaving. The review by Dunlosky et al. (2013) rates it among the techniques of moderate utility, with clear results mainly for exercises where you have to choose the right method, as in mathematics or physics.

The benefit is simple: if you do twenty derivative exercises in a row, you know in advance which technique to use. In the exam, the exercises come mixed, and recognizing the type of problem is part of the difficulty. Mixing during review trains you for that sorting.

In practice, avoid long single-subject days. Two or three blocks of different subjects per day, and mixed sets of exercises at the end of a chapter, are enough. The same logic applies to MCQs: a set that mixes several chapters looks more like the real exam.

A planner filled to 100% is wrong by day three. An illness, an assignment to hand in, a chapter longer than expected, and everything slips. Buffer days are days deliberately left empty to absorb these delays.

Plan, for example, a free half-day per week and one or two completely free days before the last week. If all goes well, they are used to redo past papers or to rest. If nothing goes well, they keep the delay from spilling onto exam week.

Also block out the days when you won't be able to study at all: a family weekend, a day of placement, a trip. It's better to remove them from the calculation than to count on them.

Sleep is not time taken away from studying. Memory research consistently shows that it contributes to consolidating what was learned during the day, and that lack of sleep impairs attention and the ability to learn the next day.

All-nighters before exams therefore combine two flaws: they add low-quality hours, and they damage recall on exam day. Keep regular hours, especially in the last week, and schedule your most demanding study at the times when you are most alert.

Mnemesia's planner starts from your real timetable. You import the university timetable in .ics format (the export format of online calendars, often offered by the student portal), then add your deadlines: each exam, with its date.

• The study workload is spread over the days remaining before each deadline.
• Blocked days (placement, weekend, trip) are removed from the calculation, which gives you your buffer days.
• The multi-deck “Review for exams” mode lets you go through all the cards of an upcoming subject in one go.

Cards, annotated courses and MCQs are in the same app, which saves you from juggling a calendar, flashcard software and scattered PDFs: see all-in-one to replace Anki and Notion. Mnemesia is free, needs no account, and works offline: download it.