The new course is built so that memorising cannot carry you very far.
In Paper 1 Section C, knowledge of the specific details of research studies is not assessed. In Paper 2 Section B, the study you have to evaluate is one you have never seen. In Paper 3, you are never asked to reproduce a study from memory, because the sources are printed in front of you.
So the question is not how to memorise more. It is what to memorise, what to train instead, and how to tell the difference between feeling prepared and being prepared.
What the exams actually reward
Three of the four components hand you material you cannot have revised in advance. Paper 1 Section B gives you an unseen situation. Paper 2 Section B gives you an unseen study. Paper 3 gives you a booklet of unseen sources.
None of those are testing recall. They are testing whether you can look at unfamiliar material and work out what it can and cannot support.
That does not mean studies are pointless. You still need evidence to argue with, and you still need enough psychology to recognise what an unfamiliar source is doing. What it means is that the return on hours spent drilling sample sizes and publication years drops off fast.
What is worth memorising, and what has to be trained
These are two different kinds of learning and they need two different kinds of practice.
| Worth committing to memory | Has to be trained by doing |
|---|---|
| Your four class practicals: method, aim, sample, operationalisation, procedure, ethics | Choosing which concepts are live in a study you have never seen |
| The six concepts as questions, not definitions | Judging what an unfamiliar design can and cannot conclude |
| The mechanism of the theories on your syllabus route | Writing an analytical paragraph under time pressure |
| Enough evidence to support each Area of Study you are preparing | Reading a graph or a set of results accurately |
The left column is finite and you can finish it. The right column never finishes, but it improves faster than you expect once you practise the right way.
One thing that cuts the left column down considerably: where the syllabus offers you a choice, one well-prepared option is enough. You do not need two mental health disorders, two developmental domains or two cognitive processes. Choosing a route deliberately is the single biggest reduction in workload available to you.
Why rereading feels like working and isn't
If you have ever finished a revision session feeling like you covered a lot and then blanked in a test, you have met the fluency illusion. Familiarity feels like knowledge. It is not the same thing.
The comparison between rereading and retrieval is one of the clearest findings in the learning research, and it is worth knowing precisely because it is counterintuitive.
Reread the material and it feels productive, because it feels familiar. On a test taken immediately afterwards, rereading performs as well as anything else, sometimes better. After a week, it falls away sharply.
Close the book and recall it instead, and it feels harder and less productive. On an immediate test there is no advantage and sometimes a slight cost. After a week, retrieval substantially outperforms rereading on retention.
The method that feels worse is the method that works. That gap is the whole finding, and it is why panic revision defaults to rereading. Rereading produces the feeling of covering ground, which is exactly what you want when you are anxious and exactly what does not help.
These are established findings in cognitive psychology rather than study-skills folklore. They describe what tends to work for most learners over time. They are not guarantees, and results vary between people.
Three study moves worth more than everything else
The blank page test. Close your notes. Take a blank page. Write everything you can about one thing: a method, a theory, a concept. What it is, what it explains, what it cannot conclude, its main weaknesses, one thing that addresses each. Then open your notes and mark your own page in a different colour.
What you got wrong is your actual revision list. What you got right needs no further attention this week. Most revision plans skip this step and then spend equal time on everything, which is how you end up over-revising what you already knew.
Explain it to someone who is not doing psychology. If you cannot explain the difference between reliability and validity to a friend or a parent in plain language, you do not understand it well enough to write about it under pressure. Technical vocabulary can hide a gap in understanding. Plain language cannot.
Write one paragraph, not one essay. Full essays are expensive. Most people write three or four during revision and improve slowly. One analytical paragraph a day, compared against a model afterwards, produces faster improvement for a fraction of the effort. Fifteen paragraphs is fifteen chances to correct a habit.
One rule sits underneath all three. Attempt before you read the model, every time. Struggling for thirty seconds and then reading the model teaches you more than reading the model twice, even though it feels worse while you are doing it.
Check what you actually know
After each topic, rate yourself honestly against four levels.
| Rating | What it means | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | I could not explain this without looking | Reread, then blank page test tomorrow |
| 2 | I can explain it but not apply it to a new study | Apply it to one unseen study using only this idea |
| 3 | I can apply it, but slowly | Time yourself. Speed comes from repetition, not more reading |
| 4 | I can apply it to an unseen study under time pressure | Leave it alone for two weeks, then check again |
Rate yourself the day after reading, not the same day. People consistently overrate what they have just read and underrate what they have not seen for a fortnight. The gap between those two ratings is the most useful information you will get about your own preparation.
Why the gaps between sessions are the point
Doing everything about experiments in one week feels efficient. Splitting it across week two and week six feels wasteful, because you will have forgotten things by the second session.
The forgetting is the mechanism. It is what makes the second retrieval effortful, and the effort is what builds durable memory. The same total study time usually produces better long-term retention when it is spread out than when it is packed into one block.
The same logic applies to mixing topics rather than blocking them. Practising all the experiment questions together is easier in the moment and worse in the long run, partly because the exam will not group them for you either. When an unseen study arrives in Paper 2, nothing tells you which method it is.
If you are short on time
For Paper 2 specifically, there is a clear order of return when the exam is close.
- Reconstruct your four class practicals accurately. That is 20 marks that cannot be taken from you if you know them.
- Learn one reliable paragraph structure for Section B until it is automatic.
- Do three unseen studies, timed, with no notes.
- Learn the six concepts well enough to name a study feature for each within five seconds.
That is a realistic plan for a week. Reading a whole revision guide cover to cover is not.
What a good week looks like
Not four hours on Sunday. Three or four shorter sessions, each one starting with retrieval of something you learned a fortnight ago and ending with one written paragraph you then compare against a model.
You will cover less ground than you would by reading, and you will remember more of it in June. That trade is the entire point.
If you want a structured starting point built for the 2027 course, the PsychExcel Starter Library is free and includes the concept work and practical records this approach depends on.