Most published Step 1 schedules fail for the same reason: they allocate time to answering questions and treat reviewing them as something that happens in the gaps. It does not. Review is where the learning happens, and a schedule that does not budget for it explicitly will quietly abandon it in week two.
The shape of the six weeks
Weeks one through four are the working period. Two to three blocks of forty questions a day, each followed by review that takes at least as long as the block did. That sounds slow, and it is, roughly ninety minutes of review for a sixty-minute block is normal when you are reading explanations properly and noting what you missed and why.
Choosing a bank that keeps your missed questions in front of you helps here. QBankly builds a review queue from them automatically, which is one fewer thing to maintain during a hard six weeks.
Week five is consolidation. Question volume drops slightly and the time goes into your accumulated review queue: the questions you got wrong, the concepts you flagged, the systems your analytics say are weak. If you have not been keeping that queue, week five is when you discover the cost.
Week six is taper. Practice exam early in the week, light review after, and genuinely nothing the day before the exam.
Where to put practice exams
Every ten to fourteen days, starting in week one. Students routinely cluster them into the final week, which converts them from a diagnostic tool into an anxiety generator. An early practice exam is uncomfortable precisely because it is informative. It tells you which systems to prioritise while there is still time to act on the answer.
The failure modes worth naming
The schedule with no rest day. It will break, and it will break by collapsing several days at once rather than gracefully.
Reviewing only the questions you got wrong. The ones you guessed correctly are the most valuable in the bank, because you do not otherwise know they are gaps.
Treating percentage correct as the metric. Percentage correct measures what you knew when you started the block. What you want to track is whether the topics you reviewed last week are the topics you are now getting right.
Adjusting the six weeks to your situation
Six weeks is a common shape rather than a rule. What matters is that the period contains enough time to finish a question bank with proper review and to take several spaced assessments. If your schedule gives you four weeks, the arithmetic changes: fewer questions per pass, tighter review, and assessments every week rather than every fortnight.
If you have eight or more, resist the temptation to simply extend everything. Beyond a point, additional weeks add fatigue faster than knowledge, and a long dedicated period is one of the more reliable routes to arriving at the exam depleted.
What the weeks should look like from the outside
By the end of week two you should have taken a baseline assessment and know your weakest systems. By the end of week four you should have completed most of a question bank and seen at least one clear improvement in an area you targeted. By the end of week five the trend across assessments should be legible.
If any of those checkpoints passes without being met, that is the moment to change the plan, not the final week, when the only remaining option is to endure it.
The mistakes that cost the most
Compressing review to fit more questions. Clustering assessments at the end where they cannot change anything. Studying through the rest day. Treating a bad day as evidence that the plan is broken rather than as a normal feature of six hard weeks.
None of these feel like decisions at the time, and all of them are.
Working with less than six weeks
Shorten the passes rather than the review. Fewer questions per day, the same proportion of time spent understanding the ones you did, and assessments weekly instead of fortnightly so the trend is still legible in a compressed window.
The instinct under time pressure is to raise question volume and cut review, which inverts the value of both. A short dedicated period done properly beats a longer one spent generating errors you never resolve.
The final week
Stop new material. Move to mixed random blocks, your own error log, and rest. Keep the last two days genuinely light, the return on studying then is close to zero and the return on arriving rested is not.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions a day is realistic during dedicated study?
Most students sustain two to three blocks of forty questions a day once review time is accounted for. Higher counts are usually achieved by cutting review, which is the part that produces the learning.
What if I fall behind the schedule?
Cut content review before cutting questions, and cut questions before cutting review of the questions you have already done. The last of those is the highest-yield hour in your day.