Revision Timetable Builder

Filling it in

Start with the exams. Each one needs a subject, a date from your school's timetable, and its topics typed as a comma-separated list — the chapter headings from your specification are usually the right grain. Add a second and third exam if you are revising for more than one; the builder schedules them together rather than one after another.

Every topic you type appears underneath with a confidence rating from 1 to 5. Be honest with it, because that rating is what decides the order. A topic you rate 1 or 2 is scheduled twice in the first pass and appears earlier in the queue than a topic you rate 5.

Then set your start date, how long a session should run, and which days you can actually revise on with the hours available on each. Hours convert into sessions by division: two hours at 45 minutes is two sessions, because a part-session is no use. Print the result, or save it in this browser and restore it next time.

• Session length: 25, 45 or 60 minutes
• First pass: one session per topic, two if you rated it 1 or 2
• Revisits: 1, 3, 7 and 21 days after the first pass
• One day a week is always kept clear

Why the revisits land at 1, 3, 7 and 21 days

Because material revisited at widening gaps is retained far better than material studied once for the same total time. Spaced practice is one of the few revision techniques with strong evidence behind it, and the gap between studying something twice matters more than how long you spent on it either time.

The exact intervals are not sacred — the research supports expanding gaps rather than one magic sequence — but 1, 3, 7 and 21 days is a workable version that fits inside a school term and is easy to check against a printed sheet. What matters is that the second look happens the next day and the last one happens weeks later, not that it is precisely day 21.

A revisit that would fall on or after the exam is dropped rather than moved forward. A topic first covered nine days before the paper gets its 1, 3 and 7 day revisits and simply does not get the 21 — squashing that session in somewhere earlier would defeat the point of spacing it.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not pretend the hours add up when they do not. If your topics need 120 sessions and your ticked hours hold 70, the builder says so, names the topics it could not place, and tells you roughly how many hours are missing. Most timetable generators quietly shrink every topic until the arithmetic works, which produces a beautiful plan covering a third of the syllabus.

It does not fill all seven days. One rest day a week is kept clear, and if you tick every day the lightest one is taken back and the plan says which. A timetable with no slack is abandoned in week two, and the day you had planned to work through is the day you get ill or have a family event.

It also makes no claim about grades. The hours-per-subject figures are a record of what has been scheduled, not a prediction of what it will earn — and it schedules whatever you type, so a topic list that is missing half the specification produces a plan that is missing half the specification. Check the list against your board's published content before you trust the totals.

Nothing is sent anywhere. The plan is built in your browser, saving writes it to your browser's own storage when you press Save, and Delete saved plan removes it. We never see any of it.

Where revision timetables go wrong

The first mistake is dividing the time evenly. Topics you already know feel comfortable to revise, so an even split quietly spends most of its hours on them. Rating your confidence honestly and letting the weakest topics go first is uncomfortable, and it is most of the benefit.

The second is topics that are too big. "Algebra" is not a revision session; "solving quadratics by factorising" is. If your topic list has six items for a whole GCSE paper, the plan will look reassuringly light and teach you almost nothing. Twenty to forty topics per subject is a more realistic grain.

The third is treating the timetable as the work. A session marked "Circle theorems" that is spent reading notes is not revision — spend it doing questions with the book shut and mark them afterwards. Retrieval, not review, is what the spacing exists to serve.

The last is not rebuilding it. Confidence changes as you revise. Come back after a fortnight, re-rate the topics, and rebuild: the topics you have fixed drop down the queue and the ones that are still shaky rise up it.