Check if you even need it.

Because it might save you the entire fortnight. Many programmes have made admissions tests optional or removed them in recent years, and the policy frequently differs between departments in the same institution — so the first half-hour goes on your actual list rather than on studying. Where it's optional, that's a decision rather than a dismissal: submit only if the score supports the application, because a weak optional score can hurt.

The weighting. Programmes weight the sections very differently by field — a quantitative programme may barely read one section, a humanities programme frequently the reverse. So improving the section your field doesn't look at is effort that never reaches the decision. The calculator splits your real hours by where the gap and the weighting intersect, and when they conflict, the weighting wins.

That you can move within a section — mark questions, come back, change answers before it ends. That makes a two-pass approach powerful: first pass takes everything you can do quickly, second pass returns to what you marked. Questions aren't ordered by difficulty, so a hard one early is a signal to mark and move rather than to work harder. This single habit recovers more points in two weeks than content revision does.

No, and it's the slow route. Isolated definitions are poorly retained and largely unusable — what works in a short window is a high-frequency list met repeatedly in sentences, with spaced review. A word known in context is usable; a word known as a definition frequently isn't. Also worth knowing: for gap-fill questions, work out what the sentence's logic requires before looking at the options, because reading them first invites you to justify each in turn.

It's about allocation rather than volume, because two weeks is a fixed budget that gets spent whether or not you decide how. The plan starts with a full timed test — people skip it because it's unpleasant, and skipping it means two weeks spent on guesses. Then the hours go where the weighting and the gap meet. And it names the commonest failure directly: collecting resources and watching strategy content feels productive and produces no practice.