My 8-week BKSB study schedule (free resources only)

What do you think about condensing this to 4-5 weeks if I can do 2-3 hours per day? I have a test date that's sooner than I'd like and trying to figure out if I can make it work.

The Anki flashcard tip is something more people need to hear. I have a BKSB deck with about 200 cards covering all the key terms and formulas. Doing 20 cards/day during my lunch break added up faster than I expected.

This is gold. Saving and sharing with my study group. The "stop studying 24 hours before" advice is underrated — I bombed an exam once because I crammed until midnight and couldn't think straight in the morning.

Great breakdown. One thing I'd add to Week 1: look at the score breakdown from your baseline practice test — not just the overall score. Most BKSB exams are weighted by domain, and knowing which domains carry more weight changes how you allocate study time.

Honestly the schedule worked better than I expected for someone squeezing study time in wherever I could. I'd do 20-30 minutes on my lunch break, then another 30-45 minutes after the kids went to bed. It wasn't glamorous but it added up. The big thing I didn't see coming was how much the maths section trips people up even if you're decent at it — the wording of the questions is just different from what you're used to, so practicing that format matters way more than you'd think.

If you've got a full-time job and a family, don't stress about hitting exactly 1.5 hours every single day. Some days you'll get 20 minutes and that's fine. I missed a few days entirely during a busy week at work and I still passed. Just keep showing up consistently and don't skip the practice assessments — they're the closest thing to the real test and I'd say they're worth more than reading any notes.

I'll be honest, I nearly quit around week 4. I wasn't seeing any improvement and work was mental that month, so I basically skipped two full weeks and felt like I'd already failed. But I came back to it and what actually helped me was stopping trying to do everything and just hammering the bits I kept getting wrong. For me that was fractions and I just did the same type of question over and over until it clicked.

Passed with a bit to spare in the end which I still can't quite believe. If you're at that point where you're thinking it's not worth it, just give it one more week. It's not a comfortable process but it does work if you stick with it. The schedule in this post is solid, I'd have killed for something like this when I started.

This is such a good approach, and I'd just add one thing that made a massive difference for me personally: whenever I got a practice question wrong, I didn't just note the right answer and move on. I'd sit with the wrong answer for a minute and actually ask myself why it seemed right at first. Usually there was a pattern -- a sneaky distractor that played on something I'd half-understood, and once I saw that pattern I stopped falling for it.

It sounds slow but it's not really, because you're not re-learning the same mistakes over and over. I'd say I probably wasted the first two weeks of my own prep just ticking through questions without doing that reflection part, and my scores barely moved. The week I changed that habit is the week things actually clicked. So yeah, don't skip the "why was I wrong" step even when you're tired.

This is exactly how I approached it too. I used to just drill practice questions and move on when I got something right, but that didn't help me much until I started forcing myself to figure out why the wrong answers were wrong. Like if I got a number question wrong, I'd work backwards through each distractor to understand what mistake would lead someone there. The bksb/questions/number and calculation 3 section was where this really clicked for me because the wrong options aren't random, they're designed to catch specific errors in your thinking.

It sounds slower but honestly it's faster in the long run. Once you understand the trap, you don't fall into it again. I'd say if you're time-crunched, spend less time on new material and more time dissecting your mistakes. That shift is what finally got me from borderline to comfortably passing.