Guide
How to study when exams are in two weeks
Fourteen days is enough to rescue a semester, but not with scattered studying. This guide gives you the order of operations: what to do in the first hour, how to split the days, and what to leave out.
7 minute read
The first hour: triage
Do not open a book in the first hour. Sit with one sheet of paper and write your situation as it is, in numbers.
For each subject write three numbers only:
- The subject's weight in your final grade, as a percentage.
- The share of the material you have not covered, estimated from 0 to 100.
- The number of days left until that subject's exam.
A written triage ends the thing that drains you most over two weeks: deciding again every hour what to study now. The sheet decides, not your mood at that moment.
The priority formula
Do not start with the easiest subject or the one you like. Start with the subject where you lose the most marks in the least remaining time.
cost of delay = weight × uncovered share ÷ days remaining
Compute the number for every subject, then rank them highest first.
A subject worth 40 with 80 uncovered and 4 days left costs 800. A subject worth 20 with 50 uncovered and 10 days left costs 100.
The highest number is your weakest subject in practice, not the one that feels hardest. Write its name at the top of the sheet and start there in your first session.
How to split fourteen days
Split the days into three blocks and never mix them. Each block does a different job.
- Eight days of coverage: read, understand and summarise, one large subject and one small one per day.
- Four days of practice: past questions under real time with the book closed, because reading never exposes the gaps.
- Two days of review: your own summaries and the mistakes from practice, with no new material at all.
A coverage day is four sessions of fifty minutes with ten minutes away from a screen between them. Five sessions are possible; six sessions cost you tomorrow.
What you leave out on purpose
In fourteen days you will not cover everything. Admitting that on day one buys you three days.
- Chapters worth less than 5 percent of the final grade.
- Decorated colour-coded notes: summarising is for understanding, not display.
- Full recorded lectures: read the summary, then go to the questions.
- Every low-weight subject with a distant exam, until the first one is done.
The first three days, day by day
- Day one: your weakest subject only. Four sessions, and one page of summary per chapter you finish.
- Day two: half the day on the weakest subject, half on the second-highest cost. Test yourself with ten questions at the end.
- Day three: a full past paper for the weakest subject under real time, then fix only what you got wrong.
Recompute the formula every three days. The numbers change and the order changes with them, and that is the difference between a live plan and a timetable on a wall.
The 1am panic protocol
Late-night panic is not a shortage of time, it is a deferred decision. When it arrives, do not study more: run three steps and go to bed.
- Write the name of the next exam and its date on a sheet, and nothing else.
- Under it write three things you know in that subject, from memory, with no book.
- Sleep at least six hours. One night without sleep costs you a whole day tomorrow.
The mid-point review
On day seven sit for twenty minutes and redo the same triage with new numbers. You will find your weakest subject has changed, and that is progress, not a setback.
If you are behind your plan, do not extend the days and do not take hours from sleep. Cut from the coverage block and protect the two review days exactly as they are.
From a plan to a system
What you read here is the full order of operations, and you can run it today with paper and a pen. The Exam Recovery Kit from Mihwaz is the same method built: the triage sheet, a workbook that computes the priority formula for you, the day-by-day plan for twelve days, and the prompt pack in Arabic and English.
Mihwaz is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a correction to this guide reaches you the same day.