IGCSE Maths: Your Last-Month Exam Checklist (May/June 2026)

You have exactly four weeks. That sounds like a lot, but it disappears fast — so the single most important thing you can do right now is figure out where you actually stand. Not where you hope you stand, not where your teacher thinks you stand, but where your marks genuinely are today. I have seen hundreds of students walk into exam season with a vague sense that they are "mostly fine" and then lose 20 or 30 marks on topics they assumed they knew. Do not let that be you. Start by printing or downloading the IGCSE Maths syllabus checklist from the Cambridge website. Go through every single topic — number, algebra, geometry, mensuration, coordinate geometry, trigonometry, vectors, probability, statistics, functions, and calculus if you are doing the Extended paper — and rate yourself honestly on a three-point scale: confident, shaky, or lost. Be brutal. If you have not practised a topic in three months, it is "shaky" at best, no matter how well you understood it in class. Once you have your rated list, pull out two or three past papers and attempt them under loose timed conditions. Do not worry about finishing — the goal here is diagnostic. Mark them using the official mark scheme, and pay attention to where you are dropping marks. Are they careless errors, or genuine gaps in understanding? This distinction matters enormously because the fix is completely different. Careless errors need exam technique; genuine gaps need re-learning. By the end of this first week, you should have a prioritised list of topics ranked by how many marks they could gain you. That list becomes your revision blueprint for the next three weeks.

Now that you know exactly where your weaknesses are, this is the week to attack them — systematically, not randomly. The biggest mistake I see students make at this stage is opening a textbook to page one and reading through everything again. That is passive, slow, and almost useless for exam preparation. Instead, focus your energy on the high-weight topics that appear on virtually every IGCSE Maths paper: algebra (especially manipulating expressions, solving equations, and inequalities), trigonometry (sine, cosine, tangent ratios plus the sine and cosine rules for Extended), functions (domain, range, composite, and inverse functions), and coordinate geometry (gradients, equations of lines, perpendicular lines). These topics together typically account for 40 to 50 percent of the marks on Paper 2 and Paper 4. Use active recall as your primary study technique. This means closing your notes and trying to solve problems from memory, not re-reading highlighted pages. Work through textbook exercises on your weak topics, but treat each one like a mini-test: attempt the question, check the answer, and if you got it wrong, understand why before moving on. Write the method steps out in your own words. Another powerful technique is to teach the topic to someone — a parent, a friend, even a stuffed animal. If you cannot explain the method clearly in plain English, you do not truly understand it yet. For each topic, aim to reach the point where you can do three consecutive questions correctly without looking at any notes. That is your threshold for "confident." By the end of this week, your "lost" topics should have moved to "shaky," and your "shaky" topics should be approaching "confident." If a topic is still stuck at "lost" after focused work, that is a signal you may need one-to-one help from a tutor — and there is still time to make it count.

This is the most important week of your entire revision period. If you only have the energy to go hard for one week, make it this one. By now you should have addressed your major topic gaps, and the goal shifts from learning content to mastering exam performance. There is a real and significant difference between understanding a topic and being able to score marks on it under timed conditions, and this week is where you close that gap. Start doing full past papers under strict exam conditions. That means timing yourself properly — Paper 2 is 1 hour 30 minutes, Paper 4 is 2 hours 30 minutes — sitting at a clear desk, using only the equipment you will have in the exam (calculator, ruler, protractor, compasses), and not looking at any notes. When you finish, mark the paper immediately while your thought process is still fresh. Use the official Cambridge mark scheme, not just answer checking. The mark scheme shows you exactly how marks are allocated, and this is where most students have their biggest revelation: they realise that method marks often account for more than the final answer. A student who writes a correct equation but makes an arithmetic slip at the end can still earn 3 out of 4 marks — but only if they showed their working. Start keeping an error journal. For every mark you drop, write down the question number, the topic, what you did wrong, and what the correct approach was. After three or four papers, patterns will emerge. You will notice that you keep making the same two or three types of mistakes — perhaps you always forget to give both solutions to a quadratic, or you mix up the sine and cosine rules, or you lose marks on unit conversions. These patterns are gold. They tell you exactly what to focus on to pick up the most marks with the least effort. Also pay attention to question structures. Cambridge recycles question formats heavily. The vectors question on Paper 4 follows the same pattern almost every year. The cumulative frequency question has the same structure. The simultaneous equations question uses the same setup. Once you recognise these patterns, the exam starts to feel predictable rather than scary.

The final week before your IGCSE Maths exam is not the time to learn anything new. I cannot stress this enough. Every year I see students panicking in the last few days, trying to cram a topic they have never understood, and all it does is destroy their confidence and exhaust them before the exam. If you have followed the plan above, you have already done the hard work. This week is about polishing, consolidating, and preparing yourself mentally and practically. Start by reviewing your error journal from Week 3. Look at the patterns you identified and do a few targeted questions on just those specific mistakes — not full papers, just focused mini-drills. If you kept dropping marks on trigonometry bearings questions, do five bearings questions. If you kept forgetting to state units, practise a set of mensuration questions with a focus on writing units every single time. Next, review your formula sheet. For the Extended paper especially, make sure you have the quadratic formula, sine rule, cosine rule, area of a triangle using sine, and the key circle theorems committed to memory. Write them out from memory each morning — the act of writing reinforces recall far more effectively than just reading them. Check your calculator. Make sure it is in degree mode (not radians), that the batteries are fresh, and that you know how to use the key functions: fractions, square roots, powers, trigonometric functions, and the ANS button. Bring a spare calculator if you have one. Prepare your exam kit the night before: two pens (black), two pencils (sharp), eraser, ruler, protractor, compasses, and your calculator. Know exactly what time your exam starts, which room it is in, and how you are getting there. Remove every possible source of stress that is not about the maths itself. Finally, protect your sleep. Your brain consolidates learning during sleep, and research consistently shows that a well-rested student outperforms a sleep-deprived one who studied for three extra hours. Aim for eight hours the night before each paper. You have done the work — now trust it.

You have prepared thoroughly. Now it is about executing well on the day itself. The first thing to do when you open the paper is not to start writing — it is to read. Spend the first two to three minutes scanning through the entire paper from front to back. This gives you a mental map of what is coming, helps you identify the questions you are most confident about, and prevents the nasty surprise of discovering a topic you revised heavily is on page 12 when you have already spent too long on page 4. Time allocation is critical. On Paper 2 (1 hour 30 minutes, 70 marks), you have roughly 1.3 minutes per mark. On Paper 4 (2 hours 30 minutes, 130 marks), you have roughly 1.15 minutes per mark. A 6-mark question should take about 7 minutes. If you have been working on a question for more than double the expected time and are stuck, move on and come back later. Leaving a 4-mark question unanswered while spending 15 minutes on it means you might miss three easy 2-mark questions at the end of the paper. Show all your working. I say this to every student, every year, and every year some of them ignore it. On IGCSE Maths, working is not optional — it is where the majority of the marks live. If the question is worth 4 marks and you write only a final answer, you can earn at most 1 mark, and if the answer is wrong, you get zero. But if you show a correct method with a small arithmetic error, you might still earn 3 out of 4 marks. Write down your equation, show each step, and circle or underline your final answer clearly. Use the read-through technique in your remaining time. When you check your work, do not just re-read what you wrote and nod along — that catches nothing. Instead, re-read the question, cover your solution, and re-do the calculation quickly on a spare bit of space. Compare the two answers. This is far more effective at catching errors than passive re-reading. Pay special attention to questions that ask for specific things: answers to 3 significant figures, fractions in simplest form, exact values, or answers in terms of pi. These instructions carry marks, and ignoring them is one of the most common ways students throw away easy points.

After tutoring IGCSE Maths students for many years, I have built up a very clear picture of the mistakes that cost students grades in the final stretch — and almost all of them are avoidable. Mistake 1: Cramming new topics in the final week. If you have never understood completing the square or vectors, the last seven days is not when you are going to crack it. Attempting to learn a completely new topic at this stage does nothing but create anxiety and steal time from topics you could actually improve on. Focus on what you know and make it airtight. Mistake 2: Sacrificing sleep for extra study. This is the most counterproductive thing a student can do, and it is incredibly common. Your brain physically needs sleep to consolidate the knowledge you have been building over the past month. A student who sleeps eight hours and revises for two will outperform a student who sleeps four hours and revises for six. This is not opinion — it is backed by extensive cognitive science research. Protect your sleep as fiercely as you protect your revision time. Mistake 3: Ignoring calculator paper techniques. Paper 4 (or Paper 2 for Core) allows a calculator, but many students do not practise using their calculator efficiently. Can you enter a fraction and simplify it? Can you use the ANS button to chain calculations? Do you know how to find the cube root of a number? Do you know how to switch between degrees and radians? These small technical skills save time and prevent errors. Practise them. Mistake 4: Not reading the question fully. This is the single biggest source of lost marks across all my students, every single year. Students see "triangle" and start using Pythagoras when the question actually requires the cosine rule. They see "simplify" and stop before factorising completely. They calculate the area when the question asks for the perimeter. Read the question twice. Underline what it is actually asking for. Then answer that specific question, not the one you assumed it was. Mistake 5: Leaving questions blank. There is no penalty for wrong answers on IGCSE Maths. None. A blank answer scores zero, but a reasonable attempt — even if it is not perfect — can pick up method marks. If you are stuck on a question, write down what you do know: draw a diagram, label the values given, write a relevant formula, substitute what you can. Partial marks add up, and the difference between a grade 5 and a grade 6 can be just a few marks across the entire paper.