GCSE exams are no longer a test of 'how intelligent' you are anymore. Nowadays, they're a test of 'how much you can remember'.  Students who perform the best in their GCSE exam's tend to have very good memory retention skills. The exam boards don't do you any favours. They give all your exams in one go, with some of them falling on consecutive days. This means your memory retention skills have to be strong in order to perform well in all your GCSE's, let alone maths. 

The best memory retention techniques are those which store content into your long-term memory. Why can you remember lyrics of a particular song for years on end? Simply because it's stored into your long-term memory. I wouldn't advise 'cramming'. Cramming involves attempting to learn heaps of text 'last minute' - just days/weeks before an exam. Cramming is only stored in the short-term memory and hence, there is a chance you could forget it in the very near future. Although it may work for some, I wouldn't recommend it because as you can see, it's a riskier approach.

The key to tapping into your long-term memory is to start early and set-up a routine. The reason why you can recall the password to your facebook account every time without fail is because you follow a routine of logging into your facebook account on perhaps a daily basis. This is how you should approach revision. Revise in a systematic way so on 'this day', you are going to read through 'this many' pages of 'this textbook' and complete 'this past paper'. Continue this pattern and what you'll notice is after a while, it will begin to stick in your long-term memory.

Also, you shouldn't revise topics in isolation. This means revising algebra one week and then trigonometry, the next. There is a danger that by learning topics individually, you may not be able to recall the key concepts of all the topics at any one time. This happened to one of my students I was tutoring recently. Remember, your GCSE maths exam is on all the topics. That's why I'm a fan of past papers because: 1) your exam will be almost identical to this and 2) you are tackling a number of topics at the same time.

If you would like a set-routine for your GCSE maths revision, I would highly recommend my GCSE maths revision program: www.passgcsemaths.com. Hundreds of students have boosted their GCSE maths grades considerably, simply by following this routine. There is no reason why it won't do the same for you. In the program, you'll also find the single most important part of your revision yet it goes widely unnoticed. This is the only area where student's grades improve dramatically! For more information, please visit: www.passgcsemaths.com