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The week before an exam is the worst time to let a chatbot do your thinking. It is a good time to let one test you. The plan below uses an AI tutor for quizzing, spotting gaps and checking your work, and keeps it out of the room for the parts you must do alone.
What should guide the week?
Three findings shape the plan.
Testing beats rereading for later recall. In Roediger and Karpicke's experiments, rereading did better on a test five minutes later, but prior testing produced substantially greater retention on tests two days or a week later, even though rereading made students more confident. A review of ten techniques by Dunlosky and colleagues gave practice testing and distributed practice "high utility" ratings and rated rereading and highlighting low. A later meta-analysis found practice tests more beneficial than restudying and all other comparison conditions.
Answer-giving AI can backfire. In a field experiment with nearly a thousand high school maths students, Bastani and colleagues found that access to a standard GPT-4 chat improved practice grades, but when access was taken away, those students did 17% worse than students who never had it. A version with prompts designed to protect learning largely avoided the harm.
Design matters. Kestin and colleagues ran a randomised trial with college students and found that an AI tutor built on the same teaching practices as an in-class active learning lesson helped students learn more in less time than the lesson did. The tutor was designed to teach, not to hand out answers.
So: let the AI ask the questions, make yourself answer them, and do your timed practice without it.
The seven-day plan
Day 7: map the gaps (2 hours). List every chapter on the syllabus. For each, ask the tutor for five short questions without answers. Answer them on paper, then ask it to mark you. Label each chapter red (two or more wrong), amber (one wrong) or green.
Day 6: red chapters. For each red chapter, ask for a short explanation of only the idea you missed. Then ask for three fresh questions on it, and answer them without looking back.
Day 5: mixed problems. Ask for a mixed set across chapters. Attempt every problem fully before asking for any feedback. Then ask the tutor to find the first line where your working goes wrong, not to solve it.
Day 4: a timed paper, no AI. Sit a previous-year paper or a full mock under real timing. Close every chat window. Afterwards, use the AI to sort your mistakes into concept gaps, careless slips and time problems.
Day 3: amber chapters and formulas. Write your formula sheet from memory, then ask the tutor to check it against your syllabus and quiz you on when each formula applies.
Day 2: light retrieval. Short mixed quizzes of ten questions, all chapters. Reread your error log from Days 4 to 6. No new topics.
Day 1: rest and a short recall. Fifteen minutes of quick questions in the morning, then stop. Sleep matters more than one more chapter; see our piece on sleep before an exam.
Exam day: no AI. Trust the work.
Prompts that keep you doing the thinking
"Quiz me on electrostatics, one question at a time. Wait for my answer before giving feedback."
"Here is my working. Tell me the first line that is wrong and what kind of error it is. Don't give the final answer."
"I got this wrong. Give me a similar question with different numbers."
"Ask me to explain why this formula applies here, then tell me what my explanation missed."
Our guide to making an AI chatbot quiz you properly has more.
When to close the chat
When it gives a full solution before you have tried.
When you are rereading its explanations instead of answering questions.
When its maths doesn't check out. AI makes mistakes; our guide on checking an AI's physics solution shows how to catch them.
Where Fermi fits
Fermi's AI tutor works out what you already know, builds a plan for the session and checks understanding as it goes, which suits Days 6 and 7. For Day 5, the Fermi Problem Library has worked problems with a step-by-step solver that explains the reasoning. Start Day 7 tonight with one chapter.
