How to Actually Revise: What Five Years of Medical School Taught Me About Studying

If you're rereading your notes and highlighting textbooks, you're probably wasting your time.

I know that's a strong opening, but it's true, and the science backs it up.

I spent five years at medical school. The volume of content is genuinely absurd — a single anatomy module covers more material than an entire A-Level subject. You don't get through that by being clever. You get through it by revising properly. And the methods most students use, even very high-achieving ones, do not work.

When I look back at how I revised at A-Level versus how I revised at medical school, the difference is enormous. At A-Level I made beautiful colour-coded notes, reread chapters, highlighted things. I felt productive. I scraped through fine grades, but if you'd asked me to recall the material six months later, I'd have given you a blank stare.

At medical school that approach collapses on contact with the workload. There's just too much. You have to extract maximum learning from every minute of revision, because there aren't enough minutes otherwise.

This post is what I wish someone had told me at A-Level.

What the science shows

Two psychologists, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, did landmark work in the mid-2000s on the testing effect. The headline finding: actively trying to recall information from memory is far more effective for long-term retention than reviewing it.

In their experiments, students who studied a passage once and then tested themselves remembered more a week later than students who studied the passage four times. Four times the study time, worse outcomes.

Separate work, much of it summarised by John Dunlosky, has ranked study techniques by effectiveness. Two consistent winners:

Active recall — closing the book and forcing yourself to retrieve information from memory. Quizzing yourself, doing past papers, explaining a concept aloud without notes.

Spaced repetition — instead of cramming all your revision of one topic into a single block, spreading it out over days or weeks with widening gaps. Your brain re-retrieves the information just as it's starting to fade, and each retrieval makes the memory stronger.

Combine them and you get the most evidence-backed revision strategy in cognitive science. It's not new. The reason most students don't use it is that the alternative feels more productive.

The illusion of productivity

Here's the trap. Rereading a textbook feels like learning. Highlighting feels like learning. Copying out notes in nice handwriting feels like learning.

What's actually happening is that your brain is recognising familiar material and giving you a comforting sense of "yes, I know this" without ever forcing you to retrieve it without help.

The moment you sit a real exam, the support is gone. The textbook isn't there. The neat notes aren't there. You have to pull it out of your head, and if you've never practised pulling it out of your head, you can't.

The most heartbreaking version of this is the student who spends six weeks on the most beautiful set of revision notes you've ever seen, feels brilliant about it, and bombs the exam. They worked extraordinarily hard. They worked on the wrong thing.

What poor revision looks like

So you can recognise it in yourself:

Rereading notes or textbooks. Almost zero retention benefit beyond the first read.

Highlighting. Genuinely one of the worst things you can do. Studies show it has either no effect or, in some cases, a negative one because it tricks you into thinking you've engaged with the material when all you've done is move a marker across a page.

Elaborate colour-coded notes. Notes can be useful as a tool to make you think actively about material, but most students copy from textbooks rather than process. The result looks impressive and the learning is shallow.

Studying with the textbook open while doing practice questions. Hit a question you can't answer, flip back to the chapter, copy the method, tell yourself you've learned it. You haven't. You've just looked something up. Real learning happens when you struggle with the question first, get it wrong, then check.

A note on YouTube and similar resources: these are genuinely useful for initial understanding of a tricky topic. A good explainer can save you hours of wrestling with a textbook. The mistake isn't using them — it's stopping there. Watch the video, pause it, then close it and try to explain the concept back without help. That's where the actual learning happens.

What good revision looks like

Strip everything back. The simplest possible version of effective revision:

1. Encounter a topic for the first time (lesson, video, textbook)
2. Close the book and try to write down everything you can remember
3. Check what you got wrong, restudy that bit
4. Come back tomorrow and test yourself again
5. Come back in three days
6. Come back in a week
7. Come back in three weeks
8. By exam time, you actually know it

Active recall on a spaced schedule. The rest is just tools.

The tools that work well:

Flashcards — Anki and Quizlet are the standard apps. The act of writing the card yourself is part of the work because it forces you to phrase the question precisely.

Past papers, marked honestly — for any exam-based subject, the highest-yield form of active recall because it replicates the exact retrieval task you'll face on the day.

Blurting — give yourself a topic, take a blank sheet, write down everything you know without looking. The gaps tell you what to study next.

Teaching the topic to someone else — verbalising forces retrieval and exposes what you don't actually understand. A study partner, a parent, or just an empty room all work.

Why Anki specifically (and what's coming)

If I were to recommend one tool above all others, it would be Anki.

Most flashcard apps make you grade yourself. You see the answer, you click "got it" or "didn't get it", and the app moves on. Anki is different. It uses an algorithm based on the spacing effect — every time you correctly recall a card, it pushes the next review further into the future (one day, then three, then a week, then three weeks, then two months). Every time you fail a card, it resets the interval and asks you sooner.

The result is that Anki does the spaced repetition scheduling for you. You just turn up each day, review whatever cards it shows you, and the algorithm handles the timing. After a few weeks, you'll find that cards you've genuinely learned barely come up, while the ones you keep failing appear constantly until they stick. It's the most efficient revision tool I've used, and it's free.

The honest summary

If I could go back and tell myself one thing before A-Levels, it would be: stop doing what feels productive and start doing what actually works. Close the book. Test yourself. Come back tomorrow and do it again.

The reason most students don't is that effective revision is uncomfortable. It exposes how little you actually know, which feels bad. Rereading a chapter is more pleasant because it lets you feel competent without ever being tested.

But the exam will test you. The earlier you get used to that feeling, the better your results will be.

You don't need to be cleverer. You need to revise smarter.