Most Year 12 revision is re-reading notes and highlighting. It feels productive because the material looks familiar. Familiarity is not recall. Two findings from a century of memory research explain what works instead, and both are easy to put into a weekly routine.
Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped the forgetting curve in 1885: memory for new material drops steeply within days unless it is revisited. What he also found is the useful part. Each time you successfully recall something just before you would have forgotten it, the curve flattens. The next review can wait longer, then longer again.
That is spaced repetition: reviewing at expanding intervals timed to the edge of forgetting, instead of cramming everything the night before or re-reading the same chapter every week.
In a well-known 2006 study, Roediger and Karpicke had students either re-read a passage or take a practice test on it. A week later the tested group remembered substantially more, even though the re-readers felt more confident. Pulling information out of memory strengthens it far more than putting it back in.
A 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues rated ten common study techniques. Practice testing and distributed (spaced) practice were the only two rated high utility. Highlighting, re-reading and summarising came out low.
For Year 12 the practical translation is: answer before you look. Attempt the question, commit to an answer, then check it against the solution. The moment of not knowing is where the learning happens.
You do not need software to space your revision, though it helps. A simple expanding schedule for each topic looks like this:
Anything you get right at Day 30 can be left until a final pre-exam pass. Anything you keep getting wrong resets to Day 1. The schedule spends your time where you are weakest, which is exactly the opposite of re-reading the chapters you already like.
Do not save past papers for the last fortnight. Use individual questions from them as your retrieval practice from term one, and keep one or two complete papers for full timed sits near the end.
Spacing works across days, not within one marathon. Twenty-five focused minutes with a five-minute break, repeated, beats three hours with a phone on the desk. Decide what "done" looks like before you start (ten questions, one section of a paper) so every session ends with something finished.
Put it to work
Sources
Figures in worked examples are illustrative. Scaling and rank conversions are recalculated by each admissions centre every year, so treat every estimate as a guide, not a prediction.