Monthly Archives: May 2026

Let me be honest with you, IGCSE Physics is not easy. There are moments when you stare at a circuit diagram or a wave equation and genuinely wonder if any of it will ever make sense. I get it. Most students feel exactly the same way. But here is something worth knowing: the students who do well in IGCSE Physics are rarely the ones who are naturally “good at science.” They are the ones who figured out how to revise properly. And that is something anyone can learn. This guide will show you exactly what to do, from building your revision plan to nailing your exam technique. Let us get into it. Start With the Syllabus, Seriously, Do Not Skip This I know this sounds boring. But downloading the official Cambridge IGCSE Physics syllabus before you start revising is honestly one of the smartest things you can do. Why? Because it tells you exactly what will and will not be tested. No guessing, no wasted time studying something that is not even on the paper. Every topic, every command word, every learning objective, it is all laid out for you. Go through it once. Highlight the topics where you already feel okay. Circle the ones that make you go “I have absolutely no idea what this is.” Those circled topics? That is where you start. The main areas covered in Cambridge IGCSE Physics are general physics, thermal physics, waves, electricity and magnetism, and atomic physics. Each one has sub-topics, and some carry more exam weight than others, which brings us to the next point. Focus on the Topics That Show Up Every Single Year Not all topics are equal. Some come up in almost every past paper. If you are short on time, and most students are, you need to know where to focus your energy first. Electricity and circuits is probably the topic that catches the most students off guard. It looks simple on the surface, but the questions get tricky fast. Make sure you genuinely understand series and parallel circuits, not just which formula to use. Know how current, voltage, and resistance relate to each other. Understand how transformers work and why they matter for power transmission. Forces and motion comes up constantly. Speed, velocity, acceleration, Newton’s Laws, these are the building blocks of the whole paper. Get comfortable reading and drawing distance-time graphs and velocity-time graphs. A lot of students lose easy marks here simply because they confuse the two. Waves and the electromagnetic spectrum, know all seven parts of the EM spectrum in order. Know the difference between transverse and longitudinal waves. Be able to describe what happens when a wave reflects, refracts, or diffracts. These questions are very predictable, which means they are very winnable. Radioactivity comes up every year without fail. Alpha, beta, gamma, know their properties inside out. Know what happens to the nucleus during each type of decay. Understand half-life and how to work with decay graphs. Once you get this topic, it actually becomes one of the more straightforward ones. Do Past Papers, More Than You Think You Need To If there is one piece of advice I would give to every IGCSE Physics student, it is this: do more past papers than you think you need to. Not to tick a box. Not to feel productive. But because past papers are literally a window into the exam. The question styles repeat. The phrasing repeats. The types of mistakes the examiner is watching out for, they repeat too. Here is how to actually use them well. Sit down, set a timer, and do the paper properly under exam conditions. No notes, no phone, no looking things up. Then go through the mark scheme question by question, not just to see if you got it right, but to understand exactly what the examiner wanted. That gap between what you wrote and what the mark scheme says? That is your revision target. Cambridge IGCSE Physics past papers are available on the Cambridge Assessment International Education website. Physics and Maths Tutor is also excellent, they have questions sorted by topic, which is really useful when you are revising one specific area. Learn Your Equations in a Way That Actually Sticks There is no getting around it, you need to know your IGCSE Physics equations. But cramming a list of formulas the night before the exam is one of the least effective ways to learn them. Instead, make yourself a single equations sheet. Every formula, what each letter means, and the units. Keep it somewhere visible, your bedroom wall, the back of your door, your desk. Look at it every day, even just for thirty seconds. Passive exposure does more than you think. Then go further. Practise rearranging equations regularly. The exam loves to give you two values and ask you to find the third. If you freeze up every time you need to rearrange a formula, you are going to lose a lot of time. The more you practise it, the more automatic it becomes. Some equations to be especially confident with: speed equals distance divided by time, power equals voltage multiplied by current, and wave speed equals frequency multiplied by wavelength. These come up in one form or another on almost every paper. Make Revision Notes That Are Actually Useful Most students make revision notes the wrong way. They sit down, open a textbook, and copy out pages of information word for word. An hour later, they feel like they have done a lot of revision. In reality, they have just done a lot of writing. Useful revision notes are short, visual, and force you to think. Try mind maps for connecting topics, put something like “Waves” in the middle and branch out to reflection, refraction, diffraction, and the EM spectrum. Add quick definitions and examples as you go. Flashcards work brilliantly for equations, definitions, and key facts. Write the question on the front, the answer on the back. Use spaced repetition, […]

Chemistry has a reputation. Ask any group of IGCSE students which subject keeps them up at night, and Chemistry comes up more than almost anything else. Not because the students are not capable, but because Chemistry demands three completely different types of thinking at the same time. You need to remember facts. You need to understand concepts. And you need to apply both of them to questions you have never seen before, under time pressure, in an exam hall. That combination catches a lot of students off guard. They revise hard, feel reasonably confident going in, and then find the paper harder than they expected, not because the content was unfamiliar, but because the questions were phrased in ways their revision had not prepared them for. This guide fixes that. It covers the topics that matter most, how to actually use past papers rather than just doing them, and the specific habits that separate students who get A and A* from those who know the material but cannot quite show it when it counts. Before You Revise Anything, Get Clear on Your Syllabus This sounds obvious. Most students skip it anyway. The Cambridge IGCSE Chemistry syllabus and the Edexcel IGCSE Chemistry syllabus cover similar ground, but they are not identical. The paper structures differ. The way questions are phrased differs. What mark schemes reward in written answers differs. A student revising from the wrong board’s materials is not just wasting time, they are actively building habits that do not match what their actual exam rewards. Before opening a revision guide or watching a single YouTube explanation, download the current syllabus document for your specific board from the official Cambridge or Edexcel website. Read through it. Use it as a checklist. Every topic on that document is fair game for the exam. Every topic not on it is not worth your revision time, no matter how interesting it is or how much your teacher covered it in class. This one habit, revising to the syllabus rather than to the textbook, is something that consistently distinguishes organised, high-scoring students from those who work just as hard but cover the wrong things. IGCSE Chemistry Topics, Where the Marks Actually Are The Chemistry syllabus is broad, and not every topic carries equal weight in the exam. Based on past papers across multiple sittings, these are the areas where marks are consistently concentrated: Atomic Structure and the Periodic Table appear in almost every paper, often in the earlier questions where marks are more straightforward to pick up. Students who are shaky on electron configuration, periods and groups, and the properties of metals versus non-metals drop marks here that should be automatic. Chemical Bonding is one of the topics where the gap between surface understanding and real understanding shows up most clearly in exam answers. Knowing that ionic bonding involves electron transfer is not enough, students need to be able to draw dot-and-cross diagrams correctly, explain why ionic compounds have high melting points, and describe the properties of covalent substances in terms of their structure. The questions go deeper than definitions, and revision needs to match that. Acids, Bases and Salts is a topic that rewards students who have done the practical work — or who have revised it thoroughly enough that they understand what actually happens in neutralisation reactions, salt preparation, and titration. This topic also connects directly to pH, indicators, and the properties of oxides, so understanding it properly has a multiplying effect across several question types. Rates of Reaction appears consistently and is one of the topics where exam questions are most predictable in structure. Students who understand how temperature, concentration, surface area, and catalysts affect reaction rate, and who can explain each effect in terms of particle collision theory, tend to pick up marks here reliably. Organic Chemistry is where a significant number of students lose confidence and marks, particularly in the second half of the Extended syllabus. The homologous series, functional groups, and reactions of alkanes, alkenes, and alcohols need to be learned systematically rather than in isolation. Students who try to memorise individual reactions without understanding the underlying patterns find organic chemistry overwhelming. Students who learn the patterns find it surprisingly manageable. Electrolysis trips up students who have learned the rules without understanding why they apply. Which electrode does each ion go to? What is produced at each electrode in different electrolytes? Why does the product change depending on concentration? These are exactly the kinds of questions that appear in the harder marks of a Chemistry paper, and they require genuine understanding rather than surface recall. IGCSE Chemistry Past Papers, How to Use Them Properly Every Chemistry revision guide tells students to do past papers. Very few explain how to get real value out of them. Here is the approach that actually produces results: Start with topic-specific questions before full papers. In the early stages of revision, working through questions on a single topic, all the bonding questions from the last five years, for example — is more effective than doing full papers. It builds focused understanding and makes it clear exactly which parts of a topic are solid and which are not. When you move to full papers, time them properly. The exam environment is specific. Sitting with unlimited time and your notes nearby is not revision for an exam, it is just doing homework. Once you are doing full papers, set a timer, put everything away, and work through it the way you will on the actual day. Mark using the official mark scheme, not your own judgment. Chemistry mark schemes are precise about the language they accept. A student who writes “the particles move faster” when the mark scheme requires “the frequency of successful collisions increases” will not earn the mark, even though they understand the concept. Learning the specific language mark schemes use is part of Chemistry revision, not separate from it. After marking, categorise every error. Not “I got 14 out of 20”, but […]