Revision Tracker

What a revision tracker is

A revision tracker is a record of three things: every topic you need to know, how many times you have revised each one, and when each one is due again. That sounds trivial until you try to revise without it, at which point the day usually starts with ten minutes of deciding what to do and ends with the comfortable topics revised four times and the difficult ones untouched.

The tracker removes that decision. Open it, look at what is due, revise those topics, mark them off. The schedule handles the rest, and the topics you find hard come back around sooner than the ones you find easy.

This revision tracker runs in your browser with no account and no sign-up. It stores your topics on your own device, schedules each review using spaced repetition, shows a progress bar for every topic, and counts down to the exam dates you enter. You can back everything up to a file and restore it on another computer.

How to use the revision tracker

1. Add your topics. Enter a subject and a topic, and add the exam date for that subject if you know it. Work through your syllabus or specification once and add everything; twenty minutes of setting up saves weeks of deciding.
2. Check the Due now tab. New topics are due immediately. Overdue ones are flagged in red and sit at the top, so nothing quietly disappears.
3. Revise the topic properly, then come back and mark it. Close your notes and test yourself: past questions, a blank page summary, flashcards, explaining it out loud. Reading it again does not count as a review.
4. Rate how it went. Struggled brings it back tomorrow. Got it moves it to the next interval. Easy pushes it further out. Honest ratings are what make the schedule useful.
5. Watch the bars fill. Each topic has six stages. When all six are complete the topic moves to Fully revised, which is your evidence that the subject is genuinely covered.
6. Back up occasionally. The data lives in your browser, so clearing browsing data would remove it. The backup button downloads a small file you can restore any time.

How spaced repetition works

In the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus tested his own memory over time and produced what became known as the forgetting curve: memory for new material drops sharply within days unless something brings it back. The follow-up finding matters more. Each time you successfully recall something, the curve flattens, and the material survives longer before fading again.

Spaced repetition exploits that. Instead of reviewing everything at the same rhythm, you review each topic just as it is starting to fade. The intervals lengthen as the memory strengthens, so a topic you have recalled five times might not need looking at for a month, while one you fumbled yesterday comes back tomorrow.

The schedule in this tracker works like this:

Rating a topic as Struggled pulls it back to the start of the sequence, which is exactly what should happen: if you could not recall it, the memory is not where the schedule assumed. Rating it Easy skips an interval so you do not waste sessions on material you have clearly secured.

Why testing beats re-reading

The most common revision method is also among the weakest: reading notes again, highlighter in hand. It feels productive because the material becomes increasingly familiar, and familiarity is easy to mistake for knowledge. Then the exam asks you to produce the information from nothing, which is a completely different task.

Retrieval practice, meaning testing yourself without the notes in front of you, is consistently one of the strongest findings in learning research. It is harder and it feels worse, which is precisely why students avoid it. The struggle to recall is the part that builds the memory.

Practical ways to make a tracked review a real review:

• Blank page. Write everything you can remember about the topic, then check your notes and add what you missed in a different colour.
• Past questions. The closest thing to the real task, and the fastest way to find out what you cannot do.
• Flashcards. Good for definitions, formulas, dates and vocabulary. Weaker for anything that needs an argument.
• Teach it aloud. Explain the topic to someone, or to the wall. The point where you start waffling is the gap.
• Practice problems. For maths and the sciences, doing questions is the only review that counts.

Breaking a syllabus into topics

The size of your topics decides whether the tracker helps or annoys you. "Chemistry" is not a topic; you will never mark it done. "The formula for sodium chloride" is too small; you will drown in entries.

Aim for something you could revise properly in one sitting, roughly 20 to 45 minutes. In practice that usually maps onto specification subtopics, chapter sections, or single lecture topics. Your exam board's specification, your module outline or your textbook's contents page is the fastest way to generate the list, and it has the added benefit of being the examiner's own map of the course.

Two habits keep the list honest. Add every topic at the start, including the ones you dread, because a tracker with the hard material missing will quietly tell you that you are ready when you are not. And name topics in your own words, because a title you understand is a title you will actually revise.

Building a revision timetable around the tracker

A tracker and a timetable answer different questions. The timetable says when you will study; the tracker says what. Both are easier when they work together.

• Block the time first. Decide which hours of which days are revision hours, and treat them like lessons.
• Start each session with the due list. Overdue first, then due today, then new topics if time remains.
• Interleave subjects. Mixing two or three subjects within a session generally beats spending three hours on one, because it forces your brain to keep selecting the right method rather than running on autopilot.
• Work in focused blocks with real breaks. Something like 50 minutes of work to a 10 minute break suits most people; our Pomodoro timer and break time calculator handle the timing.
• Leave slack. A timetable with no empty space collapses the first time a day goes wrong. Empty slots are catch-up slots.
• Protect sleep. Memory consolidation happens overnight, so a late night of cramming often costs more than the extra hour gains.

Being honest with the ratings

The schedule is only as good as the ratings you give it, and there are two ways to break it. Rating everything Easy to make the due list shorter produces a tracker that looks wonderful and teaches you nothing. Rating everything Struggled out of anxiety produces a due list you can never clear, which is demoralising and no more accurate.

A workable rule: if you could produce the main content of the topic from memory with only small gaps, that is Got it. If you needed the notes to get going, that is Struggled. If it felt like reciting something you already knew cold, that is Easy. You are not marking yourself for anyone else, and the only person a generous rating fools is you in three weeks' time.

The last two weeks

Close to an exam the schedule's job changes from building memory to keeping it available and finding remaining gaps. A few adjustments:

• Stop adding new topics unless something genuinely was missed. Late additions rarely reach a useful number of reviews.
• Prioritise by weakness and weighting. Sort your attention towards topics still on early stages, especially those worth the most marks.
• Switch to full past papers under timed conditions. Nothing else prepares you for doing it all at once, to the clock.
• Do quick passes over the fully revised topics rather than ignoring them. Ten minutes each keeps them fresh.
• Keep the routine steady. Sleep, meals and some time outside are part of performance, not a reward for finishing revision. A tired brain recalls badly no matter how many stages are ticked.

Mistakes that waste revision time

• Rewriting notes neatly. Hours of work that mostly exercises your handwriting.
• Revising what you already know. Comfortable, and the reason weak topics stay weak.
• Making the timetable the project. A beautiful colour-coded plan is not revision.
• Marathon sessions. Four hours on one subject produces less durable memory than the same hours spread across four days.
• Treating the tracker as the goal. Filling bars is not the point; being able to answer questions is.
• Never checking against real questions. Past papers tell you what the exam actually asks, which is often narrower than your notes.

Paper trackers, spreadsheets and apps

Plenty of students track revision on paper, and it works. A grid of topics down the side and review columns across the top gives you the same information at a glance, with the bonus of being visible on a wall. The cost is that you must work out the intervals yourself, and rescheduling gets messy.

Spreadsheets add arithmetic and sorting but take setting up, and most people abandon them around the third formula. Dedicated flashcard apps with spaced repetition are excellent for facts and vocabulary, less so for essay subjects where the unit of revision is an argument rather than a card.

This tracker sits between those: it holds topics rather than cards, does the interval maths for you, and needs no account. If you like paper, use both. Print nothing, tick nothing, just keep the topic list somewhere you will look at it daily, because the tracker only helps if you open it.

Frequently asked questions

Start tracking today's revision

Add three topics you know you have been avoiding, revise one of them properly, and mark it off. That is the whole system, and after a week the tracker will be telling you what to do instead of you deciding. Back to the tracker.