Exam study plan calculator

How the plan divides your time

The calculator counts every day from today up to the day before the exam. In each seven-day block it marks the chosen number of days as rest days and keeps the rest as study days. It then splits the study days into one phase for learning new material and one phase per review round. Learning a topic for the first time is counted as one unit of work and every later review as half a unit, so the share of days for new material is 1 ÷ (1 + 0.5 × review rounds). Review days are split evenly between the rounds, with any spare day going to the earlier rounds.

Example: the exam is 21 days away, you have 10 topics, want 2 review rounds and take 1 rest day a week. Three of the 21 days are rest days, leaving 18 study days. Half of them, 9 days, go to new material, so you cover about 1.1 new topics a day. Round 1 then takes 5 days at 2 topics a day and round 2 takes 4 days at 2.5 topics a day.

Getting the most out of the schedule

The last day for new material is the most important date on the plan. Anything you first meet after it gets no review at all, so treat that date as a hard deadline and move topics forward if you fall behind. Review rounds are more effective as active recall than as rereading: close the book, write down or say what you remember, then check. Past papers fit naturally into the last round.

Two or three rounds suit most university exams. Fewer than one round is risky for anything cumulative, while four or more only make sense with a long run-up, since every extra round shortens the time for learning. If the calculator reports more than about four new topics a day, the plan is unlikely to hold; the honest fix is to start earlier next time, and for now to prioritise topics by their weight in the exam. Keep at least one rest day a week if the run-up is longer than two weeks: tired study sessions tend to be slow and poorly remembered, and a plan that leaves no slack collapses at the first sick day.