How to Revise for Maths A Level ?

Top Tips for A Level Maths Revision

According to data reported by the AMSP, 41.8% of A Level Maths students received a grade of A* or A in 2023. The secret to getting those top grades is effective revision technique.

When I returned to university in my 40s to do my maths degree, I had to revise the entire A Level Maths curriculum as a preliminary. I then home-schooled my daughter in GCSE and A Level Maths, including closely overseeing her revision processes. And before joining Save My Exams I taught a large number of A Level Mathematics and Further Mathematics students in my role as a maths teacher. So you could say I know a thing or two about A Level Maths revision!

How is Maths Different to other A Level Subjects?

More than just about any other A Level subject, Maths is

• Less about what you know (i.e., have memorised)

• And more about what you can do (i.e., your problem-solving skills)

Yes, there is notation and terminology you need to be familiar with, and formulae you need to know. But the most essential skill of all will be your ability to answer the sorts of questions that appear on the exams. So that is what you should focus the majority of your revision time on. Memorising every detail of vast reams of revision notes is not the path to A Level Maths success!

Maths is also a subject where what you did before very much matters for what you are doing now.

• Most of what you learned in GCSE Maths is going to be essential “prior knowledge” for your A Level course.

Mathematics doesn’t change much or often at GCSE and A Level — Pythagoras is Pythagoras, a quadratic is a quadratic, and trigonometry is trigonometry. So a quick flip through those old GCSE revision resources can be a useful warm-up in preparation for your A Level revision.

When Should I Revise for A Level Maths?

It is important to plan ahead to make sure that you devote an appropriate amount of focused revision time to your A Level Maths material. Your own revision timetable should reflect your personal learning and working styles, but there are a few general revision tips that apply to everyone.

Revision starts on Day 1

Revision is not something that should only happen in the period right before your exams. You should begin revising from the first day of your A Level course in Year 12:

• Revise the material from each day’s lesson that evening

• Revise the material from the previous week over the weekend

• Revise the material from each topic or section of the course as soon as you have finished it

• Revise everything you have done so far before any mock exams or other tests

If you get in the habit of revising constantly, you will already be “halfway there” come the spring of your exam year. This is how I revised all the way through university, and it made my pre-exam revision so much less stressful.

Revision timetables during the exam period

I had a friend at university who would only ever revise for the next exam on his timetable. Not surprisingly, he tended to do very well on his first exam (that he’d spent weeks revising for) and rather less well on all the exams that followed in closer succession. The lesson here is that it’s important to have a revision plan and that you make sure you devote sufficient time to all the topics of all the A Level courses you have exams in.

For me personally during revision time:

• I used to divide each revision day into three periods (morning, afternoon, early evening), figure out the total number of periods over the revision and exam weeks, and sketch out a timetable with an approximately equal number of revision periods devoted to each course.

• Except for the day before an exam (when I would focus solely on the upcoming exam’s material), I would constantly cycle through all the material for my remaining exams.

I found these shorter but more frequent revision sessions for each subject to be quite valuable. In the times between revising a particular course or topic, my subconscious would always do amazing work organising and consolidating the material I had revised previously.

It’s also important not to forget to plan breaks and downtime into your revision timetable. Burning out from too much revising can be as bad as not revising enough. Go out for a walk, play a bit of sport, hang out with friends. Just make sure those breaks don’t start spreading into time you have set aside for revision.

What Sorts of Revision Resources should I use?

This is another area where personal tastes and styles can (and should) lead to differences of approach. But here are some notes and thoughts about the different types of resources.

Personal notes

By the time it came to pre-exam revision, my personal notes were at the core of my exam revision process. For me, the goal was to get all the essentials for a course down in black biro on to a couple of single sides of white A4 paper (because I’m a black biro on white paper kind of guy!). My daughter prepared a single side of handwritten A4 notes for each of her A Level modules, with different coloured paper distinguishing Pure from Stats from Mechanics. You may find other techniques useful. For example:

• Some people love extensive colour coding and/or highlighting

• Others find mind maps incredibly useful

• Flash cards can help with things you need to remember

• Flow charts are also very useful for showing problem-solving approaches for certain types of A Level Maths exam questions (there’s a wonderful example of a trigonometric equation-solving flow chart on the Save My Exams site here)

And don’t forget that how you create your personal notes can also be important. According to this article in the New Scientist (based on research just published in January of 2024), writing by hand is significantly better than writing on a keyboard for creating the sorts of brain connections that lead to memory formation.

Teachers and maths tutors

Your maths teachers (and a maths tutor if you’re lucky enough to have one) are incredible resources in and of themselves. They will years of experience not only with the maths, but with the exams and exam boards that you are dealing with. They also love it when you ask them questions — so ask them any and everything you think will help you understand the subject. They are also really good for suggesting other reliable resources you can use for revision.

Online resources and apps

The great thing about a site like Save My Exams is that we have already done a lot of the revision work for you. Our Revision Notes boil down your course content into the absolutely essential things you need to know to to succeed on your exams for your exam board. There are hundreds of Worked Examples to show how things work, and literally thousands of Topic Questions (with student-friendly model answers) to practise your skills on.

Videos

Just a quick word here on videos. Having an expert talking you through a topic, and having things moving on a screen rather than just sitting on a page, can be great aids to learning. Save My Exams’s A Level Maths and International A Level Maths resources, for example, include hundreds of topic revision videos and question solution videos. But to derive benefit from videos, you need to be interacting and actively engaging with them. For example, stop the video when a Worked Example first appears and have a go at solving it yourself. Just sitting passively in front of a screen while the video plays is not really “revising”, and is unlikely to help you much or at all.

Textbooks

Some people think that textbooks are a bit “old-fashioned”. I love a good textbook myself, but it is true that the bulk of a maths textbook is devoted to teaching the subject rather than helping you revise a subject already learned. Still, there are two sections that appear in almost any textbook that are immensely valuable for revision:

• Practice questions will appear at the end of sections, chapters, and at the end of the entire book itself. Working through these textbook questions (especially any marked as “exam style”) is great preparation for your exam.

• End-of-chapter summaries will often condense all the material in a chapter down to one or two pages of essential “need-to-knows”. I always strongly encouraged my students to use these summaries when creating their personal notes.

Of course, it is essential to make sure that the textbook you are using matches the specification of the A Level Maths course you are taking!

Printed revision guides

Printed revision guides are produced by a wide range of companies. Like online revision sites, these have the advantage (unlike textbooks) of being focused on revision. Because of the printed format they cannot be updated as regularly as online resources. But they still work where there’s no Wi-Fi or phone signal. Plus, you can write notes all over them!

Exam board materials

There are large amounts of material available on the various exam boards’ websites: Edexcel, OCR, AQA, CIE.

Course specifications and syllabi

These set out all the things you are meant to learn in a course, including details about the exam papers. They may also contain lists of notation and command terms used, details of approved calculators, and other info. They are written for teachers rather than students, so you may need your teacher’s help in making sense out of these documents. But you should definitely have a look at your course spec at some point during your A Level studies.

Exam formula booklets

Download a copy of the formula booklet that will be provided when you sit the exam. Use it often, not only when you are practising exam questions, but throughout your course. You need to know:

• What is in the formula booklet, so you know for sure what you don’t have to memorise

• Where things are in the formula booklet, so you can find them quickly during the exam

• What isn’t in the formula booklet, so you can make sure your notes contain any formulas you do have to memorise

Past papers

Okay, shocking revelation time: I didn’t even know that things like banks of past papers and mark schemes existed until I was 40-something and in university for the second time! But these are certainly one of the most important resources available on the exam board websites (as well as on many other sites online, including Save My Exams). Past paper questions will be discussed more in the next section of this article.

Mark schemes

These (at least in theory) provide “answers” for the questions on past papers. But they are answers written for the people who mark the exams, and not to help students know how to work out the answers. They can still be useful, and your teachers can help you to make sense of them. But the sorts of student-friendly model answers provided for Save My Exams A Level and International A Level Topic Questions will likely be a lot more helpful for you.

Examiners’ Reports

From your perspective, these are probably the least useful things on an exam board website. Still, if you thought that a particular past paper question was particularly harsh, it can be comforting to look in the examiners’ report and realise that almost no one did well on that question when the exam was sat.

What is the Best way to Prepare for Actual Exam Questions?

Like the old joke about “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”, the short answer is: “practise, practise, practise”. But what are the best materials to practise on?

Past paper questions

In an ideal world you will work through every single past paper question that is available to you. Just a couple of things to be aware of:

• Make sure you are using past paper questions for the current version of your course. You can find past papers online for versions of courses and specifications going back decades. Only questions from past papers (and specimen papers) for your current spec are guaranteed to be relevant for your course. I have had many students panic about a past paper question they had no idea how to answer, only for me to point out that the question was from an old spec that included things they didn’t need to know.

• Past paper questions are a finite resource. For a new or new-ish spec there may be especially few past papers available. Try to save at least a set or two of past or specimen papers to sit “under exam conditions” near the end of your revision.

• Pros: some questions on your exam will look like questions on past exams. This is one of the main reasons to practise past paper questions. Certain question types tend to recur over and over in papers over the years.

• Cons: some questions on your exam will look nothing like questions on past exams. Examiners are always looking for new ways to test you on the topics in your course. The most challenging questions on an exam are often the ones “no one saw coming”. So you shouldn’t only rely on past paper questions for your practice.

Exam-style questions

In textbooks, and on sites like Save My Exams, subject experts have created questions that they know will help you practise all the skills you need to succeed on whatever questions the exam throws at you. Textbooks will often mark certain questions as “exam style” — whereas on Save My Exams all of our Topic Questions are written to be exam-style. These are the best types of questions to practise on when it comes to exam time.

• Exam style questions are a much less finite resource. Simply put, there’s a lot more of them than there are past paper questions! When my daughter did her A Levels, she did all the odd-numbered questions in the textbooks when she was first learning the topics. Then she went back and did all the even-numbered ones (along with any that gave her trouble the first time) when she was revising ahead of her exams. On Save My Exams you could work through all the questions at one level (Medium, say) earlier in your A Level journey, and come back and try the higher levels (Hard and Very Hard) as the exams are getting closer.

Make sure you’ve mastered the essential skills

There are certain basic skills (often taught at GCSE or at the very beginning of your A Level course) that run through almost all the topics in A Level Maths. Mastering these skills can often assure you more marks overall than “skipping ahead” to the harder bits.

• For example, algebra. Algebra, algebra, algebra. It is literally impossible to practise algebra too much ahead of your A Level Maths exams. Being able to carry out algebraic manipulations quickly, accurately and confidently is perhaps the single most important skill for A Level maths exam success.

Know your calculator inside and out

Being able to use your calculator efficiently is a key to success on your Maths A Level exams. You’re going to need to know:

• How your calculator works. You don’t need to know every bell and every whistle on your no doubt very widely functional calculator. But you do need to know how to use all the functions on it that might be called for in questions on your exam.

• When to use your calculator. Your exam board may expect you to use your calculator for certain types of calculations (solving a quadratic or evaluating a definite integral, for example), unless a question says otherwise. Be sure to be clear about your exam board’s expectations for calculator use.

• When not to use your calculator. Look out for certain command terms that let you know that working out by hand is required for full marks — “show that” or “by using an algebraic method”, for example. Also know yourself. If your mental maths skills are particularly strong you might find it quicker not to use a calculator for certain kinds of calculations. But remember, there are no marks awarded for showing off!

Also make sure that your calculator is on your exam board’s approved list, and that you have put it into “exam mode” (if necessary) before the exam!

Work on your exam technique

It is a sad but true fact that mastery of a subject all on its own does not assure top marks on an exam paper. You also need to work on your exam technique. In particular:

• Practise against the clock. Try to save at least a set or two of past papers you have never looked at before to practise working through with the clock running. In the exam, you’re going to need to strike a balance between speed (to finish as much of the exam as possible) and accuracy (to not make mistakes that lose marks or waste time).

• Practise under “exam conditions”. Different people experience “exam-day nerves” to different extents. But experience of exam conditions — such as school mock exams, or having sat your GCSEs — can help to minimise this as much as possible.