How to revise

When you revise, what you want to be doing is coming at each topic with the aim of deepening your understanding, not with the aim of recalling the state of understanding that you had at the time that you last thought about it. Revision should be continuous with the study that you did in the first place, not a mere repeating of it. For that reason, ‘revision’ is a rather misleading term.
 

I. A bad strategy

Now, there's a strategy that many people adopt that really isn't very effective. This is the strategy of ‘going over’ your notes on the tutorial readings, your essay, and any notes you took in tutorial. Not only is this a rather hopelessly vague strategy (what is ‘going over’, exactly?), but at best it's only going to put you in the position you were in at the end of the tutorial. That's better, I would hope, than the position you were in before the tutorial, but it hardly reflects the progress that you would want from your degree.

What should you do instead? The best approach may differ from person to person, but here's a suggestion.
 

II. A better strategy

The point of revision is to get you as close as possible to a full understanding of the interest of and viable things to think about a given topic. The degree of your understanding, together with your skill in deploying the tools of philosophical reasoning (e.g. looking for counterexamples, uncovering assumptions, identifying necessary and sufficient conditions, spotting surprising implications, etc.) are what the exams test for.

(a) Collect questions

So start by considering again the questions that you would be able to answer if you had a mastery of the topic in question—the questions that get people philosophising on the topic in the first place. Essay questions are a good start. So are past paper questions. So are any questions that I give you in reading lists to guide your thinking. Collect them all together, grouping them by sub-topic.

(b) Write first-pass answers

Now, concentrating on one group at a time, try to write a short paragraph answering each question. Go back and forth between the paragraph that you're composing in answer to the question, your essay, the comments in the margin of your essay, any notes you made after the tutorial, and most crucially, texts from the reading list. The texts should include both those you've read and those you haven't, and from my and any other reading list that seems authoritative. At all times you should be doing targeted reading, not just cover-to-cover. You're looking for specific answers to specific questions, not necessarily for the whole of what an author wants to say.

(c) Expand and update

If you do this properly, you're not just going over things: you're mining them for specific information: positions, arguments, objections, responses, ideas. As you write your paragraph answer, continually updating it, you should find that you keep stumbling across arguments, objections, ideas, etc. that are relevant for answering other questions in the group. So jot down the beginnings of answers to those, too. When you turn to answer them properly, you might find that you need to update the answers to other questions that you wrote out earlier. Do that too. The document should be constantly evolving, your answers becoming more informed, more nuanced, as you gain a greater sense of the alternative answers that someone might give.

(d) Summarise

After you've done that, it might be worth trying to set out in a new document the main positions that a person might take with regard to some sub-topic, and—more importantly—the main moves or considerations that might lead one to adopt one of those positions or move from one to another. It's almost more important to know the moves than to know the positions. Virtually everyone writing on a given question in the exam will be able to produce a survey of the main positions on the relevant topic. But not everyone will have a clear sense of what might be said to get, say, a hedonist to abandon hedonism for desire-satisfaction theory and a clear sense of what might be said to get an objective list theorist to abandon objective list theory for hedonism. If you can do that and deepen your sense of which of these moves are particularly powerful and which not so powerful, you'll move closer to the sort of mastery you want, and which will secure you a high mark in the exam.

Again, in attaining this mastery, consult texts, notes, essay, my comments, and me. And again, this should be targeted consultation, not mere cover-to-cover reading or very general questions.

One useful tool at this stage may be to write short essays in response to essay questions that seem broad enough to invite answers that address main themes relating to the topic. When I want to know what I think about a topic that I haven't considered carefully for a while, I'll often go back to read an article I've written on it, because the argument of that article sets out the state of my best understanding of the topic to date. It crystallises it and that allows me to concentrate on other things without worrying that I'll lose hold of the ideas that I was working on. You can do the same thing, and later consulting the essays you write may well be more useful than consulting a much longer document, even if the longer document's more comprehensive.

Finally, at all points, remember that the people that you disagree with are very good philosophers and have thought a great deal about this. So you can never rest easy that your assessment of the plausibility of any given move or position is the right one. You have to read opponents of that assessment charitably and carefully, and try to see why they oppose it. Keep your mind open. At any given point, it's good for you to have a view about which positions and arguments are strongest and why (you have to be able to say why—the mere impression that they're strongest isn't good enough), but you should always be trying to convince people who disagree, not just nodding along with those who agree. It's not your job to preach to the converted but to persuade the unconverted.
 

III. Keep in mind the point of degree-level learning

I hope that this conveys a sense of how you might proceed. I can't stress enough that if you treat your degree as if it's an A-level, with a curriculum and a bunch of points that you're supposed to know and which are sufficient for a good mark if you reproduce them in your exams, then you're going to waste the ability that got you here. (I am not accusing anyone of doing this. I just want it to be as clear as possible what you want to avoid.)

The point of degree-level learning is understanding, not knowledge, even though you need the latter for the former. You gain understanding only through ongoing study, thought, repeated attempts to articulate and defend conclusions, and constant questioning of yourself and others. If you're not permanently unsatisfied with the state of your understanding and hungry for the book, the argument, the idea that will deepen it, then you're not doing it right! It will take some experimentation to find the way of working that suits you best, but that's roughly the ideal.

As I said, revision should really be continuous with the study that you've already done. In fact, I recommend pretty much the same approach for tutorial study. The only difference is that in revision you have some familiarity with the lie of the land that you lacked at first, so your study can be that little bit more targeted.

There's some explicitly exam-focused work that you can do, too, and that's to write (longhand) timed practice answers in exam conditions. It's good to do this at intervals as you go through the process I've just described, because it's very helpful to know how much you can write in the time available, and to practise handwriting. (You don't want to put your examiner in a bad mood because s/he can't read your writing properly. I'm sure that this must affect marks, if only a little, and if your writing's bad enough it can cost you money as well. Show others your writing and see how hard they find it to read.) But don't do this alone, because although you should be thinking on your feet as you write an exam answer (not just regurgitating a set of preformulated responses), thinking in that context is clearly not going to be able to take on board new arguments and ideas from new reading or re-reading.