Student Trove
Revision Schedule Generator
Enter your subjects, exam dates, and available hours. Get a concrete day-by-day revision plan.
Your Subjects & Exams
Available Study Hours Per Day
Enter 0 for days you can't study.
Your Revision Schedule
How the schedule is generated
The generator answers a scheduling question, not a memory question: given the topics you have to cover, the dates your exams fall on, and the hours you can actually study on each weekday, where do the sessions go?
hours per subject = ceiling(topics × hours per topic × 1.2)
The 1.2 is a deliberate 20% buffer. Topic estimates are almost always optimistic, and a plan with no slack fails on its first bad day. From there the allocation runs in four steps:
- Subjects are sorted by exam date, so the nearest paper claims time first.
- Days are built from today to your last exam, each carrying the hours you said are available on that weekday.
- Each subject is filled into the earliest days that still have capacity, taking at most three hours of that subject per day, and never past its own exam date.
- Total hours needed is compared against total hours available, and any shortfall is reported.
The three-hour cap is what stops the plan collapsing into single-subject marathons. It forces subjects to interleave across days, which is both better for retention and more robust — if you lose a day, you lose a slice of several subjects rather than all of one.
A worked example
Aisha has three exams and can study three hours on weekdays and five on Saturdays, with Sundays off. She estimates 1.5 hours per topic.
| Subject | Exam in | Topics | Hours needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physiology | 10 days | 18 | 33 |
| Biochemistry | 14 days | 22 | 40 |
| Anatomy | 18 days | 26 | 47 |
Working it through
This is the most useful outcome the tool produces, and the one students least want. Aisha's realistic options are to raise her daily hours, cut her hours per topic for material she is reviewing rather than learning cold, or decide in advance which topics she will not cover. All three are survivable. Discovering the gap two days before the first paper is not.
Spacing, and what this tool does not do
It is worth being precise about the mechanism, because "revision schedule" and "spaced repetition" are often used as if they were the same thing. They are not.
This generator allocates workload: it decides which hours get spent on which subject. Spaced repetition governs review intervals: having learned something, when should you see it again so that it sticks? The evidence for spacing is strong and long-standing — material reviewed at expanding intervals is retained substantially better than the same total time spent in one block — but acting on it requires knowing how well you recalled each item, which a calendar cannot know.
The practical combination is to use this tool to reserve the hours and interleave the subjects, then spend those hours on active recall rather than rereading, and let a system that tracks your performance decide which items resurface.
Study Lab does the second half: it turns your notes into flashcards and quizzes, tracks which items you get wrong, and resurfaces them in later sessions through a mistake bank — so the review intervals follow your recall rather than the clock.
Frequently asked questions
How far in advance should I start revising for exams?
Work backwards from the hours rather than picking a number of weeks. Estimate roughly 1.5 hours per topic, add a fifth for overrun, and divide by the hours you can realistically give each day — that tells you the date you needed to start. For a typical semester module of 20 topics that is about 36 hours, which at two hours a day is around three weeks per subject. Since subjects overlap, most students need four to six weeks before the first paper.
How does this generator allocate study sessions?
It estimates each subject's workload as topics multiplied by hours per topic plus a 20% buffer, sorts subjects by exam date so the earliest paper is placed first, and then fills your available days from today forwards. It never allocates more than three hours to a single subject in one day, and it stops allocating a subject once its exam date arrives. If the hours needed exceed the hours you have available, it reports the shortfall rather than silently compressing the plan.
Is this schedule based on spaced repetition?
No. It is a workload allocator: it distributes the hours you need across the days you have, prioritising the nearest exam. Spaced repetition is a different mechanism that governs when you revisit material you have already learned, based on how well you recalled it. The two work together rather than competing — use this to reserve the hours, and a spaced-repetition tool to decide what to review inside them.
Why does the generator cap a subject at three hours a day?
Because returns fall off sharply after about three hours on one subject in a single day, and because splitting a subject across several days produces better retention than covering it in one long block. The cap also forces the schedule to interleave subjects, which is well supported as more effective than studying one subject to completion before starting the next.
What should I do if the schedule shows a shortfall?
A shortfall means the plan does not fit and something has to give, so choose deliberately rather than by default. You can increase your available hours on specific weekdays, reduce the hours per topic for subjects where you only need review rather than first-pass learning, or accept that some topics will not be covered and choose which ones using past-paper frequency. Discovering the shortfall three weeks out is the point of running this.
Should I schedule study time on the day of an exam?
The generator does not, and deliberately so — it stops allocating a subject once its exam date arrives. Light review on the morning of a paper is fine, but new material learned that day rarely survives to the exam hall and the anxiety cost usually outweighs the benefit. Days after an early exam are far more valuable, and the generator will already have filled them with your later subjects.
Scheduling around a real timetable
This generator assumes a fixed number of free hours per weekday. Real weeks are not like that: classes move, some days are full, and the gaps that are genuinely usable vary week to week.
Study Planner generates study sessions against your actual class timetable — including Week A / Week B alternating weeks — so the plan is built from the time you really have free rather than an average.