16th July 2020

VCP-NV Revision Tips

Revision techniques

In my last post I listed some of the best materials to use in order to pass the VCP exam. This time I’m going to focus more on revision techniques.

How everyone revises comes down to personal preference; what works for one person may not work for another. I’m going to list the main technique I use and a few additional ones. However, these methods might not work for you and that’s perfectly fine. You have to find out how you learn best. If you’re a visual person you might learn better by making diagrams or mind maps. If you learn by repetition, try writing out notes on cards, whiteboards or on your laptop.

Notecards

The main technique that I use is writing out notecards. You can buy notecards online or you can just cut up pieces of paper or card. You can even type them out but this part doesn’t matter. I prefer to handwrite my notecards because this involves the element of repetition. I write a question on one side of the card and the answer on the other. I ended up with a few hundred notecards! Don’t worry -this does take a long time, however, it’s part of the learning process so don’t think you’re wasting time if you choose this technique.

After I’ve written out the notecards, I start learning them. Reading the question first and then learning the answer. You can do this in your head but I find it helpful to verbalise it and read the question and answer out loud. Once you’ve spent sufficient time learning the information, you can start testing yourself on the questions and making piles. I separate my responses into three piles: ones I know really well, ones I know quite well and ones I don’t know. This means I can focus more on the ones that I don’t know as well. If you feel like this is becoming a bit repetitive and you want a bit of variety- try getting someone else to test you on the questions.

Condensing

Another way to learn is by condensing the information. For example, if you have three pages of information try condensing it into two pages. This works by making you read and understand the information well enough to be able to work out which parts of the information are more important and which bits are less important, and therefore able to be cut out. You can then repeat this process and condense the two pages of information into one and so on until you only have a few paragraphs to learn.

Highlighting

A slightly different method than condensing is highlighting the vital facts from the page and learning these. You can then write out the key facts or you can cover the page and try and memorise them and then test yourself.

There are so many ways of revising and no way is right or wrong. Experiment- try different techniques until you find the one that works for you!