Five Weeks to Go!

I'm now five weeks(ish) away from my first AS exam (Russia 1855-1917). On the whole, I'm nervous but feeling more confident the more revision that I do.

I've spent the last 4-5 weeks revising for the Russia exam and I feel that my grasp on the topic is better now than it was a year ago when I was working on it. I'm using a pages and pages of spider diagrams for the various units and questions and can rattle off the material when I'm given a prompt (i.e. 'why did Alexander reform?') and I can also see how the topics fit together to form the larger topic of economic and political reform in Russia in the period in question. The only material that I haven't covered in my revision is the October Revolution and the role of Lenin, so I'm hoping that doesn't come up.

This week I've started revising Britain and Appeasement 1919-40. I've made some progress but I'm hoping that I can devote more time to it over Christmas. At the moment, I feel less confident about the material than I do about Russia, and am worried that my brain will only be able to hold so much information and the more I put in about the new topic, the less I will be able to store about the previous one. The appeasement exam takes place a week after the Russia one, so I have 6 weeks to get my head around it. I was worrying about the exam and wondering whether I should try and cancel my application for the appeasement exam and just focus on Tsarist Russia, doing the English Civil War exam in June and appeasement the following January, but aside from losing 25 quid, it would be dragging the whole exam process out for too long. I think I'm just panicking. A month ago, I was considering pretending to be ill on the exam days and trying to get a refund, but I've got over that now. I just need to knuckle down a bit more and go through the pain of revision.