Last Week Before an Exam: A Day-by-Day ADHD Plan

You look at the calendar: the exam is seven days away. Three possibilities cross your mind. Finishing all the topics from the beginning, making a brand new schedule from scratch, or saying "it won't happen anyway" and giving up. All three are the moves a student with ADHD makes most often in the last week, and all three have a cost.

To my mind, the last week is not a week for learning something new. It is a week for firming up what you know, closing what you half know, and knowingly leaving the places you will not be able to reach. Below is a sample plan spread over seven days. The hours are examples; shift them to fit your own day. After the plan I wrote about what you need to drop, sleep, the last night, the morning, and what to do if your week has already gone badly.

For the general study framework there is the post on how to study as a student with ADHD, and for the map of the whole preparation process there is the post on how to study for an exam. This post covers only the last seven days.

A half-hour map before starting the plan

The plan itself begins with a half-hour job done before the seven days: writing the exam scope on a sheet of paper. Write all the topic headings one under another and put one of three marks next to each: I know it, I half know it, I don't know it at all.

This sheet has two functions. The first is that it shows you the real situation. In ADHD you may know less than you feel, or more than you feel; both are feelings without evidence. The second is that this sheet carries the whole plan for the week: the ones marked "I half know" are the work of the first three days, and the ones chosen from "I don't know at all" are the work of the fifth day.

Put past years' questions or the sample questions given by the teacher next to it. If you do not have any, ask the teacher or a friend; the best source of questions in the last week is past exam questions. Fix your source at this stage: the book, notes and question set you will use this week should be settled and not change.

What you drop this week

The last week is spent less on doing things than on not doing things. I think these should be dropped.

Buying new sources. Every new source means a new starting page, and in ADHD starting pages are appealing, finishing pages are not. Trying a new method or app, by the same logic. Redrawing the schedule, even the plan in this post. Set up the plan once and carry it out; redrawing turns into a kind of procrastination (writing a schedule can easily turn into a form of procrastination). Rewriting or color-coding notes. That rereading a text while underlining it gives low benefit comes out consistently in learning research, while self-testing and spacing out study are among those that give high benefit (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Asking how much others are studying or looking at "last week" posts on social media; it raises anxiety and adds nothing to your plan. Stealing from sleep, which I write about separately below.

Medication and caffeine are on this list too. In exam week, do not change the time, dose or pattern of your medication on your own; talk about it with the doctor. Do not increase caffeine this week either. Caffeine stays in the body for hours and pushes sleep away; a coffee drunk late in the afternoon can affect that evening's sleep.

The plan for seven days

The sample below is set up for roughly three to four hours of study a day. For someone with classes, school or work this is a realistic load. Someone with free time can double the blocks. Each block is around forty-five minutes, with fifteen-minute breaks in between. Every block has one single job; it is written not as "I'll study" but as "I'll solve these questions from this topic".

Seven days before: map and first blocks

Sample hours: 17.00-17.30 draw up the map and collect the questions. 17.45-18.30 first block: the first topic on the "I half know" list. Don't open the topic; first write on paper what you remember, then open it and fill in what is missing (self-testing gives better learning than rereading; one of the well-known studies showing this effect is Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). 19.30-20.15 second block: five or six questions from the same topic. Finish. At the end of the day, write the topic of tomorrow's first block in one sentence.

Six days before: the half-known

Sample hours: 17.00-17.45, 18.00-18.45 and 19.45-20.30. Three blocks, three different "I half know" topics. The same order in every block: first recall, then open, then questions. Instead of squeezing three topics back to back, I spread them out; if possible, it is good to return to the same topic once more during the day, and to do a short twenty-minute recall in the evening. It has been shown that spaced-out review often gives better learning than review piled up in one go (Cepeda et al., 2006). Most of these studies were done with participants without ADHD; there is no separate evidence for ADHD, but I do not think the logic breaks down in ADHD.

Five days before: the rest of the half-known and deliberate gaps

Again three blocks, starting at 17.00, 18.00 and 19.45. The first two blocks are the remaining "I half know" topics. The third block is a pick from the "I don't know at all" list. There is a decision here: you cannot learn all of them. Pick two or three topics that will bring the most points or that depend on a large part of the scope, and work on those. Write the rest on the paper at this stage as "I am leaving these for this exam". Leaving them written down keeps you from throwing them out of your head and calling them back in panic two days later.

Four days before: the full mock exam

A full mock exam at the hour the exam will be held, with the real time limit, in a similar environment if possible. Phone in another room, book closed. The result is data more than a score: sort your mistakes into three bags. Knowledge gap, attention error (skipping a reading, a calculation error, misunderstanding the question stem) and time problem (not being able to finish or getting stuck on one question). Sorting takes twenty to thirty minutes and tells you half of the work to be done. For the time-management side there is the post on managing time in the exam hall. The mock exam starts at 14.00 or at the hour the exam will be held; I do not put any other block into that day. In the evening, just half an hour for sorting.

Three days before: close the gaps

Three blocks, starting at 17.00, 18.00 and 19.45. A topic block for the knowledge gaps: first recall, then open, then questions. A separate sheet for attention errors: a list of "the mistakes I repeat most". In most people a few kinds of mistakes repeat: not reading the negation in the question stem, not writing the unit, marking the last option without seeing it. Write this list on a single page and read it once before the exam. Also prepare a one-page summary sheet for each topic; no new information, just a list of rules and formulas in your own sentences.

Two days before: mixed questions

Sample hours: 17.00-17.45 and 18.00-19.00, then finish. Two blocks instead of three, and both from mixed questions: questions from different topics in a single set. In the exam the questions do not come in topic order; studying with topics mixed is therefore a rehearsal closer to the exam. In the second block you can also do a half mock exam. The most important rule of this day is to finish studying once it is past eight in the evening. Then logistics: exam venue, transport, ID, pen, watch, water, when to leave. Write it all on a sheet of paper and pack the bag. You can use if-then logic here: "When the alarm goes off in the morning, the first thing I'll do is see the bag by the door and eat breakfast."

One day before: a light day

A single block as an example, between 17.00 and 18.30. Study that does not go over an hour and a half in total. Go through the summary sheets once, read the attention-error list, solve ten questions and stop. No new topics, no new question book. The job of this day is not to add information but to build the feeling of "I am ready". A twenty to thirty minute walk during the day is also a good idea. There are studies showing that movement has positive effects on attention and mood, but I do not know of anything that measures how much a walk the day before an exam helps. I see it as a way of emptying out anxiety.

If the hours of the day do not suit you

The sample hours are all set to evening hours, because for someone with school or work, study mostly happens there. But the hour at which you can focus may be morning. To find the slice that comes easiest to you, you can run a two-day trial at the start of the week: do the same kind of task at two different hours and note in which you could start faster and how long you could stay. Put the heaviest work, that is self-testing and analyzing mistakes, in that slice; leave the easy jobs (the summary sheet, logistics) to the other hours. If you use medication, it makes sense to take into account the hours when your medication is working, but changing the dose and time is something to talk about with the doctor. The details of this subject are in the post on medication and studying.

If you do not have three hours a day, shrink the plan but do not break the order. If you have two hours, the mock exam four days before and the closing of mistakes three days before stay in place, and you drop a third of the half-known. If you have one hour, a single job a day: give one day to the map, one day to the mistakes, one day to self-testing. Even in little time, the questions "what did I do and what am I leaving" can be answered.

The seven days at a glance

Day	Main job
7 days before	Map, first "I half know" block
6 days before	Three half-known topics
5 days before	The rest of the half-known, deliberately chosen gaps
4 days before	Full-length mock exam, sorting mistakes into three bags
3 days before	Closing knowledge gaps, attention-error list, summary sheets
2 days before	Mixed questions, logistics, early finish
1 day before	Light review, walk, bag, early bedtime

Making sleep part of the plan

The last week is the week when sleep is most easily sacrificed. In ADHD the sleep phase already drifts late, and exam week makes it worse (I wrote separately about the reasons for going to bed late).

That sleep plays a role in the consolidation of learning and that sleep loss is negatively associated with learning and performance is well documented. So I think that every hour of study gained by stealing from sleep in the last week is paid for the next day with lower efficiency. I do not give an exact number, but settling on a fixed bedtime for at least a few days is a sufficient goal: moving toward exam day by trying to go to bed fifteen to twenty minutes earlier each evening than the evening before is more doable than a sudden change.

You also need to prepare in advance for the chance that you cannot sleep; I wrote the details in the post on exam morning, sleep and anxiety. In short: screens and exam talk should lessen after eight in the evening, tomorrow's list should be emptied onto paper before bed, and there should be no studying in bed.

The last night

The last night is split into two jobs: finishing and sleeping.

Finish studying around eight or nine in the evening. Then check the bag, the ID, the pens, and write the first twenty minutes of the morning on a sheet of paper: when I'll get up, what I'll eat, when I'll leave. This list turns the morning's decisions into ones made before getting into bed, and in ADHD things get easier as the number of morning decisions goes down.

If you feel you will not be able to sleep, do not count it as a catastrophe. If your mind is racing, get up, write what is on your mind on paper in dim light, then lie down again. Take studying until morning off the list of options.

Reading the arousal in your body as "I am preparing" instead of trying to suppress anxiety completely is a tried approach; I described it in the post on test anxiety.

Exam morning

The details of the morning are in a separate post; here I write only the last link of the plan. Get up at the normal hour, eat a light but filling breakfast, you will find the bag ready because you prepared it the previous evening, leave the house early. On the way, instead of studying, read the attention-error list once. When the exam starts, give the first two minutes to looking over the paper, divide the exam into sections and put a clock mark for each section. Making time visible from the outside instead of feeling it is the exam-hall counterpart of everything I have described this week.

Instead of having the "have you studied this" conversation with friends before the exam, you can stay alone or occupy yourself with something far from the subject. This changes from person to person. If it were me, I would stay away from conversations that raise anxiety.

If the week has already gone badly

This section is for someone who has wasted the first four days and now has three or four days left.

First, take a twenty-four-hour break from the self-blaming talk. The thought "I ruined this week too" often stops the next step completely in ADHD; its name is all-or-nothing thinking. The week went badly, but the time left is still enough to do something.

Then count the hours left. Three days, three hours a day: nine hours. The whole exam is not learned in these nine hours, but it is possible to close the core that carries most of the scope. When picking the core, look at these: which topics bring many questions, which are the foundation of other topics, which topics did the teacher stress in class and repeat in past questions.

Change the way you learn too. Instead of reading the book from the beginning, solve past questions and go back to the relevant part where you get stuck. Starting with questions saves more time than long texts explaining a new topic from scratch. This is not clinical evidence, it is an efficiency preference; it is what I would do.

Write down the topics you will leave too: "In this exam I am leaving these topics." This has an emotional benefit. The thing you leave stops being a half-finished job that stays in your mind at every moment and becomes a decision that has been made.

The decision to protect sleep is the hardest part of this week, because in a rescue week stealing from sleep is very tempting. But it is a debt paid with low efficiency the next day. At least give the last night to sleep.

If you are at university and you have a real excuse (like a health problem), one option is to talk to the teacher or the department and ask about possibilities such as an excuse exam. The rules change from institution to institution. If you do not have a real excuse, instead of trying to use this door, do something after the exam: take half a page of notes on why the week was lost. Do not write "I was lazy"; write which day, at which task, at which hour it broke off. For the next term that is the most valuable data. I explained how you can prevent this across the whole term in the post on a term-long plan for a university student.

What I take from it

The most dangerous side of the last week is the meaning loaded onto it. Trying to make up for a whole term in these seven days puts a heavy load into the plan, and in ADHD a heavy load often turns into not starting. So I think the right attitude is to approach the last week like a modest job: gather what you have, pick the gaps, sleep.

I do not think what works this week is a magic method. What works is decisions. Deciding what you will drop, at which hour you will take the mock exam, at which hour you will go to bed. In ADHD, as the number of decisions goes up, things collapse. Making the decisions at the start of the week is much cheaper than making them again every evening.

It is also necessary not to count the exam result as the evaluation of this week. If you set up a week that suits the way your mind works, the result stays within what was possible with what you had. The rest you can leave to the plan of the next term.