Build a difficulty-weighted exam study plan
When several exams approach, the hard part is dividing limited time fairly. This planner counts the days until your exam, multiplies by your daily study capacity to get a pool of hours, then distributes those hours across subjects by difficulty so harder subjects receive proportionally more revision. The result is a concrete number of hours per subject you can schedule.
How it works
First it computes the available hour pool:
days left = whole days from today to exam date
total hours = days left * hours per dayEach subject gets a difficulty weight (easy = 1, medium = 2, hard = 3). The share for a subject is its weight over the sum of all weights:
subject hours = total hours * (subject weight / sum of weights)So a hard subject (weight 3) gets three times the hours of an easy one (weight 1).
Worked example
Say you have 20 days, 4 hours per day (80 total hours) and three subjects: Maths (hard), History (medium), Biology (easy). The weights sum to 6:
| Subject | Difficulty | Weight | Hours allocated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maths | Hard | 3 | 80 × 3/6 = 40 |
| History | Medium | 2 | 80 × 2/6 ≈ 26.7 |
| Biology | Easy | 1 | 80 × 1/6 ≈ 13.3 |
Maths gets three times as much revision as Biology. If after the first practice paper Biology looks shakier than expected, re-rate it as medium — the planner immediately rebalances, pulling hours toward it from History.
When to update the plan
A static plan written on day one goes stale quickly. Treat the difficulty ratings as live signals:
- After a practice paper or mock exam — if you scored below 60% on a “medium” subject, upgrade it to hard and regenerate.
- After finishing a topic — if a previously hard chapter now feels secure, downgrade it and let the freed hours flow to the next hardest subject.
- If daily hours change — holidays, illness, or commitments cut the available pool. Update the daily hours and the plan adjusts proportionally without you having to rethink every subject by hand.
Practical scheduling tips
The allocation gives you a total for each subject, but not a daily timetable. A few approaches work well on top of it:
- Block scheduling: assign whole subjects to specific days and preserve depth. Good when subjects are very different and context-switching is costly.
- Interleaved sessions: mix subjects within each day. Research on interleaved practice suggests it improves long-term retention compared to massed repetition, though it feels harder in the moment.
- Spaced review: reserve 10–15% of each subject’s allocation for review in the final days rather than learning new material, which consolidates what you already studied.
Re-rate a subject as harder the moment a practice paper goes badly — the plan instantly shifts hours toward it, which is the whole point of weighting over equal splits.