5 Key Revision Strategies for A Level Economics when you have less than 30 days left
It’s less than 30 days to the A Levels - if you didn’t do well for your prelims, what should you be doing for your revision to best optimise your chance of scoring well for the A Levels?
#1 - Do 1 Essay & 1 Case Study everyday
An essay will take you 45 minutes to complete while a case study should take you an hour to complete. That’s 1h 45 minutes of revision time - a reasonable amount of time to set aside daily for a H2 subject daily.
Here’s the most important thing to do after you have done the daily practice: take another 30 minutes to ensure that you check your answers against an answer from a reliable answer.
When checking your answers, grade your own answers and ask yourself, if you were an examiner, how many marks would you award yourself for your answers (based on the suggested answers), and why?
Take another 15 minutes to jot down key things you’ve missed out, and refer to your lecture notes to concepts that you might have forgotten / don’t understand.
Effectively - this means you should be spending at least 2.5 hours on Economics everyday!
#2 - Familiarise yourself with Economic events from the last 2 years
The A Level Economics paper is likely set a year in advance and uses data / news sources from a year to 2 years before the sitting of your paper.
You will definitely need to know monetary, fiscal & (some) supply side policies that SG has implemented and the reasons why they were implemented, as well as macro problems of major economies such as US and China.
#3 - Do up a content checklist of things that are always tested at the A Levels
Refer to two things, A) The syllabus document which you can download from SEAB website, B) your TYS.
Using the above 2 sources as your raw materials, come up with a checklist of concepts & skills that you will need to master for the A Levels because they are frequently tested. And ensure that in the next 30 days, you are doing questions that helps cross these items on the checklist off.
#4 - Read suggested answers to past year prelim papers or TYS
You will need good quality answers from reliable sources for this - get a good copy of TYS answers and/or past year prelim questions answers (this year or last year’s).
Get an A4-sized notebook, read through questions - ask yourself what would you have written for these questions, then look at the answers. Ask yourself why were the answers structured in this manner.
Proceed to write key points from the essay answers into your notebook (make sure you first write the question out in your notebook) before summarising key points from your suggested answers.
For CSQs, it is good to try to understand the logic behind how the marks for 2m - 6m questions are scored, e.g. is it for the use of supporting data, is it from the identification of trends, use of theory learnt or application & evaluation.
#5 - Manage your time & your handwriting
Legibility is a factor that I would consider if I’m an examiner grading. Improve on your handwriting if you have terrible handwriting. Also - look out for your time, practice time management if you never ever finish your answers on time.
General rule of thumb -> 1m = 2minutes for CSQ
Suggested length for essays -> 1 full side of a page for every 10 marks (excludes diagrams)
These are the things I’d absolutely encourage all my students to do when they have less than 30 days to the A Levels - good luck and all the best!