The last 48 hours before an exam

5 min read · updated 12 October 2026

The work is done by now

Two days out, your subject knowledge is more or less what it will be in the exam. That is not defeatism — it is the reason the last 48 hours are worth planning rather than filling. What changes in this window is not how much you know; it is how well you can reach it under pressure.

Which means the goal shifts. Up to now the aim was learning. From here the aim is arriving in the room calm, rested, and with the most useful things near the surface.

Stop starting new papers

A fresh past paper the night before is a gamble with poor odds. If it goes well you learn little you did not already know. If it goes badly — and an unfamiliar paper often does, because it will contain something you have not met — you walk into the exam having just had evidence that you are not ready. That feeling is not accurate, but it is powerful, and it costs marks the next morning.

Reread instead. Your own list of lost marks, if you have been keeping one, is the single most valuable document you own at this point: it is a record of exactly how you drop marks, which no textbook can give you.

What is actually worth doing

• Reread the questions you got wrong, and the mark scheme beside them. Not the whole paper — the specific questions.
• Redo one question type you know is weak, from a paper you have already sat. Familiar material, targeted practice, no surprises.
• Go over the formula sheet if your subject has one, so you know where things are rather than hunting in the exam.
• Check the logistics: the date, the start time your centre has given you, what you need to bring, how long it takes to get there.

Sleep is revision

Memory consolidates during sleep. A late night trading four hours of rest for four hours of rereading is almost always a bad trade — you arrive with marginally more in your notes and noticeably less ability to retrieve any of it, think clearly, or read a question carefully. Misreading a question is one of the most expensive mistakes in any exam, and it is a tiredness error far more often than a knowledge error.

The morning of

Eat something. Arrive early enough that the journey is not part of the stress. Avoid the group outside the hall quizzing each other on obscure details — ten minutes of that before an exam has ended more students' composure than any paper ever has.

In the room, read the whole paper first if time allows, and start with a question you can definitely do. Getting marks on the page early settles you, and the hardest question is rarely improved by meeting it first.

And between papers

When one exam is finished, it is finished. Do not reconstruct it with friends and do not look up the answers — you cannot change it, and the only effect is to carry it into the next one. Close it, and move to the next subject.