With a week left before a big exam, the biggest mistake is treating every topic as equally urgent. A more effective approach is to spend the week narrowing in on what actually needs work, then finishing with practice that matches real exam conditions. Here's a simple day-by-day shape for it.
Days 7-6: Start with a diagnostic, not a review. Take a mixed quiz that spans the full range of topics the exam will cover, without studying beforehand. The point isn't the score — it's finding out, honestly, which topics you're weak on before you spend a single hour reviewing anything.
Days 5-4: Spend these two days almost entirely on the weak spots the diagnostic surfaced. Filter quizzes to just those topics and work through them at increasing difficulty. This is the highest-leverage part of the week — an hour spent shoring up a genuinely weak topic does more for your score than three hours re-reading a topic you already know well.
Days 3-2: Shift from topic practice to timed, exam-conditions practice. Take full-length quizzes with a fixed time limit, covering a mix of topics rather than one at a time, to build the pacing and stamina the actual exam will require. This is also when it's worth reviewing the explanations on questions you got wrong during the earlier diagnostic, to make sure those specific mistakes don't repeat.
Day 1: Ease off. Light review only — skim past mistakes and their explanations, don't take on new material, and don't take a long quiz late in the day. Cramming new content the day before rarely sticks and mostly adds stress.
Exam day: A short, easy warm-up quiz first thing in the morning — five minutes on something you're already confident in — is enough to settle nerves and get you into a testing mindset without tiring you out before the real thing.
