Millie and Alicia share their revision tips

Millie and Alicia are undergraduate students at Hertford College. In this short blog they share their top two tips for revising effectively. 

Millie Fantham - Law at Hertford College

Change up your workspace

Changing up your workspace is really important when you are spending lots of time revising, to make sure that your brain doesn’t get bored. I like to spend my mornings in the library and then work in a shared study space with my friends in the afternoon. This means that I don’t feel trapped in the environment that I work in but also that I have time to be sociable and see my friends whilst being productive. 

Give yourself rewards

It is important to reward yourself for working hard; whether that’s with a coffee break, an evening off or snacks. This will incentivise you to work towards your goals, meaning you will be more efficient and get the treats afterwards.  You could even be productive with your rewards; tell yourself that you’ll go for a run when you finish a piece of work or tidy your room with a film on in the background (you’d be surprised how nice this is after a full day of revision).

Alicia Fisher - History at Hertford College

Colour coding 

As I did lots of humanities subjects with plenty of content, I found it super helpful to colour code my highlighters. Try and have a different colour highlighter representing a different thing. For example; one for quotes, one for dates, one for statistics, one for people etc. This makes going through your notes much easier when revising, as you can pick out key information quickly. Colour association also helps you to remember things more easily.

Different types of revision

It's been scientifically proven that revising something in three different formats helps you to retain memory more easily. Try reading your notes, then writing them out in a different way, then typing them up into a presentation format which you can then read out (to friends or just to a wall). This will help you condense the information and create lots of different types of revision sources.