You’ll be glad you came across this article today because I’m going to explain why you are on course to underachieve in your GCSE maths exam even before you begin revising for it. Before I continue, allow me to tell you a little about myself.

My name is Jeevan Singh and I’m a maths specialist and author. You may or may not have heard about me before. I achieved an A* in GCSE maths, which I took a year early. I’ve also helped hundreds of students do better in their maths exams both in the UK and abroad. My revision principles have been adopted by dozens of schools across the country. Don’t get me wrong, if there is anybody you should take advice from about passing exams, it should be me.

So what is the best way to revise for your GCSE maths? You pick up a revision guide from a local shop and begin writing notes from it? WRONG. As a matter of fact, this is the absolute worst way to approach revision. A* students do not do this. Instead, they reverse engineer.

Reverse engineer means to start at the end result and work backwards. It’s such a powerful tool and it’s what all A* students do. You would typically begin with your exam timetable and everything else such as your revision timetable, resources etc. will derive from this.

You may not have received your exam timetable just yet (they’re usually issued towards the end of the year) but it’s quite simple to create. Ask your teachers for the exam board and specification of your exam. Then, look-up the date of the exam on the exam board’s website. Collect all the dates and arrange them in a chronological order. Voila, you have your exam timetable. Make sure you do this first as it’s very important.

Once you have your exam timetable, create your revision timetable. You want to focus on revising subjects in the same order as your final exams. Aim to revise every subject in a single week. You are very likely to take more than 7 subjects so you’ll have to revise two subjects on certain days. Revise maths in isolation and pair-up subjects which are similar in nature. For instance, English and English literature go hand-in-hand. It’s important to pair up subjects which are similar in nature to aid memory retention.

Your first GCSE exam is usually around mid-May and run until mid-June. You’d want to give yourself a fair amount of time for past papers and developing your exam technique. That’s why you should stop working through revision guides from the 1^st March. From the 1^st March onwards, focus solely on past papers and perfecting your exam technique. Only use your revision guide/tools as a reference if you need extra clarification on a solution in a past paper.

This means, you’ll have a little over 4 months to work through your revision guides. If you follow my ‘all subjects in a week’ rule, you will revise a particular subject once-a-week or 4 times in a month. In all, you’ll have approximately 16-17 days to learn the entire syllabus of a subject before you enter the exam phase in March. When you consider these calculations, do you think reading through a 250-300 page textbook is feasible? Do you think you’ll be able to get through it in time for the exam phase in March? Of course not!

That’s why it’s crucial to reverse engineer. It enables you to think about the long-term strategy and it makes revision more streamlined. Let’s suppose you didn’t reverse engineer when revising for your GCSE exams. You would’ve bought 200-250 page textbooks. It would have taken you an awful long time to get through these books and revision would’ve been so inefficient. As you get closer to your exams, stress builds as you cannot finish reading through the textbooks. You are determined to complete each textbook so you continue to work through them during the exam phase in March. As a result, you do not dedicate enough time to developing your exam technique (remember this is the most critical phase of your revision) and you underachieve in your final GCSE exams.

I hope you can now see the power of reverse engineering. Remember, everything stems from the exam timetable so create this first. Then, consider the revision schedule and lastly, the resources you’re going to use. If you want a suitable revision guide for GCSE maths, I’d highly recommend my program: GCSE Maths in Four Weeks. In there, I will give you the same step-by-step revision strategy I followed to get an A* in GCSE maths. All you have to do is copy it and your result will improve dramatically.

>> Click here to Download my full GCSE course today at a whopping 90% Christmas discount >>