Exam Countdown Timer

A countdown number is only useful if it changes what you do today. The color bands this tool uses — green (14+ days), yellow (8–14 days), orange (4–7 days), red (3 days or fewer) — map reasonably well onto three distinct phases of exam prep, not just an anxiety gauge. Here's how a 14-day runway breaks down:

Notice the split isn't even: roughly half the runway goes to first-pass review, a bit over a third to practice, and the last couple of days are deliberately light. That ratio holds up reasonably well whether you have 7 days or 21 — scale each phase proportionally rather than always allotting a fixed number of days to review.

The reason to split your remaining days into review-then-practice phases rather than cramming everything at the end comes down to the spacing effect: material reviewed in separated sessions is retained far better than the same material reviewed in one continuous block, a finding that has held up consistently since Hermann Ebbinghaus's original forgetting-curve experiments. Each time you revisit a topic after a gap — rather than immediately rereading it — you're forcing retrieval from memory instead of just recognizing it on the page, which is what makes the information stick past exam day. This is also why the first-pass review phase above should touch every topic at least twice with a day or two between passes, rather than reading each chapter once and moving on.

When you've added more than one exam, don't just study whichever one feels most urgent emotionally — use the days-remaining numbers to allocate your study hours proportionally. If one exam is 5 days out and another is 18 days out, the near one should get the majority of today's study time even if the far one covers more material overall, since the far exam still has room for a proper spaced review cycle later. A simple rule: whenever an exam crosses into the orange band (7 days or fewer), it should take priority over anything still in green, regardless of subject difficulty.