At one university where I worked as a Disability Adviser, Law undergraduates had to sit nine three-hour exams in the space of a couple of weeks that assessed everything they had learned over the entire three-year degree, with 100% of the degree awarded based on these marks.
That seemed extreme for anyone, let alone neurodivergent students managing working memory challenges, attention difficulties or fatigue. The irony being that all would also receive 25% extra time, or over six hours more time, to try and get their brains to conform to a way of assessing their knowledge that couldn’t be less suitable for them.
All of which would lead you to think that preparing for exams, given both the challenges they cause and importance to a student’s success, would be a fairly high priority when it comes to DSA-funded support.
And yet, when I worked as an assessor, it never really was. And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t a bad assessor. Instead, I remember feeling like it was a problem that couldn’t really be solved. Especially not with a piece of software.
But maybe I was just thinking about it in the wrong way.
The cramming paradox
Many students I spoke with avoided revision. Not because they were lazy or disorganised, but because they couldn't start it without the pressure of an imminent exam giving them the sense of urgency needed to kickstart their brain into revision mode. Or urgency-dependent motivation to give it a more technical name.
This would often result in the night before an exam spent trying to cram in as much information as possible, ready for it to spill out onto the exam paper the next day. So, no sleep, high stress and maybe not enough time to get through everything. Doesn’t sound like ideal preparation, does it?
But without the last-minute pressure, there is no revision at all.
How is that conundrum ‘fixable’ with a piece of DSA-funded software?
But wait..
What if cramming is, in fact, a valid strategy. Or at least a rational response to a real neurological barrier. Plus, what if there were actually evidence indicating that cramming can lead to better outcomes on test day than the same number of study hours spread out.
What if we’ve got it all wrong, and those night-before sessions could be genuinely effective?
Perhaps we then need to rethink. Firstly, what does ‘good’ cramming look like, and secondly, are there tools to support it?
Good cramming
Good cramming is not, sadly, falling asleep to an audio version of your lecture notes and subconsciously absorbing them.
Instead, cramming works when it has something to work with. If you've never engaged with the material – never been to the lectures, never done any reading, never written anything about the subject – cramming isn't going to save you. But if you've followed the lectures, done some reading, written a few essays? Cramming can surface all of that effectively. The foundation is there. The night-before session just brings it to the front.
Which raises an obvious question. If neurodivergent students struggle with urgency-dependent motivation, and the lectures, the reading, and the note-reviewing all suffer from the same absence of urgency as the revision itself, how does the foundation ever get built?
This is the part that often gets missed when we think about revision. Many neurodivergent students are aware, at some level, that they will leave revision until the last minute. They know the all-nighter is coming. They know it will be stressful and probably not enough. And they know that they can't do much to change it. That's not apathy. That's their reality, with no obvious way out.
Except there is a way out. But it isn't a better revision strategy. It's a different question entirely.
The foundation problem
The conventional ways students are expected to build knowledge across a term- through re-reading lecture note and independent reading, require exactly the skills neurodivergent students find hardest. Self-initiated, unstructured, low-urgency tasks with no immediate feedback or reward. The standard model of term-time learning was built around neurotypical patterns of self-regulation, and it quietly excludes students who need structure, repetition, and a reason to engage right now rather than eventually.
So, instead of thinking about how to get neurodivergent students to revise, the key is to help them build knowledge across a term in a way that suits how their brain actually works. That way, when the urgency finally arrives, there's something genuine to cram from.
That's where low-friction knowledge consolidation comes in – strategies that are brief, active, and embedded in the natural flow of studying, rather than added on top of it. In ways that genuinely suit individual learning preferences. Not a revision phase, a habit.
For example:
AI-generated quizzes from lecture notes or readings Upload a set of lecture notes to your preferred AI tool and ask it to generate questions on the key points. The cognitive effort required is low – the material already exists, the questions are generated automatically, and the student simply has to engage with them.
Flashcards made at the point of learning The most effective moment to create a flashcard isn't during revision – it's immediately after a lecture or seminar, when the content is fresh. Notes uploaded and converted into flashcards that can be reviewed in minutes, across the term, using spaced repetition. A small act that compounds into the foundation that cramming needs.
Sketchnoting Rather than writing up notes after a lecture, sketch a quick visual representation of the key ideas – not an elaborate mind map requiring an hour of effort, but a rough sketch that captures relationships between concepts. A central idea, a few branches, some simple icons. The act of deciding what to draw forces the same cognitive work as retrieval practice.
Back to the assessor's perspective
To me, the question I should have asked in a needs assessment is: What does revision look like for you?
If the answer is that cramming is probably how it's going to go, that's not a failure to fix. It's a starting point to work with. The job then becomes making sure that when that urgency arrives, there's actually something there to work with. Knowledge that was built in small moments, in formats that suited how the student thinks, without requiring a level of self-regulation that was never realistic in the first place.
That's not a lower standard; it’s adapting how the student learns to suit their needs. And it might be the most useful conversation that student has about their exams.