Thirty days out, the worst thing you can do is "reread every subject from the top." Those thirty days aren't for cramming in more knowledge — they're for plugging holes and drilling rhythm. Here's a week-by-week plan you can follow as written, with the reasoning behind each step.
Two principles that hold up
A sprint plan shouldn't run on vibes. Two effects from cognitive psychology, replicated many times over, are worth using as the skeleton:
Spacing effect: the same amount of review, spread across several days, sticks better than the same amount crammed into one. That directly overturns the "vocabulary this week, grammar next week" split — by the time you review grammar, the vocabulary has already begun to fade. The right move is to touch a bit of every subject every day, so each item gets "seen again a few days later."
Retrieval practice: actively pulling an answer out of your head beats rereading by a wide margin. So "do the question, cover the answer, self-test" beats "read the notes again." Rereading gives a false sense of "I basically know this"; a question exposes it instantly.
One conservative note: these effects are real, but they aren't magic — results vary by person, and they don't replace basic time on task. They just help you spend a finite 30 days where it counts.
The 30-day table (by week)
Week 1 — audit your weak spots. Don't rush to pile on volume. Do one diagnostic set per question type (vocab, grammar, reading, listening) and mark the area where you miss most. You might assume grammar is your weakness and discover the points are actually bleeding out of listening. Know where the holes are first, so the next three weeks don't flail.
Week 2 — cycle your mistakes. Concentrate fire on the weak areas you audited. Do questions → wrong ones go into the mistakes notebook → come back in 1–2 days and redo → re-flag the ones still wrong. This week is about grinding mistakes with spaced repetition — not fast, just filling the same pit until you stop falling in.
Week 3 — exam rhythm. Start full timed mock exams, 2–3 a week. The point this week isn't the score — it's time allocation: which section eats too many minutes, where to cut your losses and skip. Keep polishing mistakes afterward, but the main axis is getting the exam's rhythm smooth.
Week 4 (final) — keep warm, fix your schedule. No new material. Do just two things: review the mistakes notebook, plus one light mock a day to keep your touch. At the same time, sync your routine to the exam (if it's a morning exam, do your questions in the morning so your brain learns to be sharp then). Taper deliberately in the last 2–3 days — the payoff from sleeping well far outweighs forcing in those extra ten questions.
Three site tools, each with its job
You can run this whole plan by hand, but three things on the site line up exactly with these three needs:
- Schedule — if you'd rather not compute each day's per-subject dose, the personalized schedule lays out what to touch each day based on your target date, which effectively puts spaced repetition on autopilot.
- Mistakes notebook — the Week 2–3 cycle leans entirely on it. The mistakes notebook collects what you got wrong automatically, ready to redo, with no copying by hand.
- Exam sprint — best for keeping warm in the final week. Exam sprint lets you drill any range without writing to your normal review schedule, and it gives you a memory-retention forecast so you can see roughly how much of a batch you'll still remember by exam day.
One last thing
Thirty days won't transform you — be honest about that. But it's enough to sharpen the "known but rusty," patch the holes you audited, and smooth out your exam rhythm. The real value of a sprint isn't how much more you learn — it's how much less you panic. When you know exactly where your weak spots are, have already gone back and gnawed on your mistakes, and have rehearsed your time allocation, the calm you carry through the exam door is, itself, points.