Thirty days is enough to move a score meaningfully, and not enough to fix everything. The plan below therefore does one thing well: it finds your largest recoverable gaps and works only on those.
Budget about six to eight hours a week. If you have more, add practice, not breadth.
Before day one: measure, once
Sit a full-length timed test, or at minimum a diagnostic across every content area. Then spend an hour reviewing it and sorting every wrong answer into content, careless, pace or guess.
This is not optional. Studying before you know where the points are is the single most common way students waste a month.
Week 1: the two weakest areas only
- Four sessions of 60–75 minutes. Each one: a short lesson on a weak content area, then 15–20 questions on it, then review every miss.
- Ignore everything else. Breadth is the trap here. A student weak in Advanced Math does not improve by reviewing punctuation.
- Keep a running error log. One line per miss: what it was, why you missed it. You will use this in week 4.
Week 2: add timed sections
- Two content sessions on the next two weakest areas.
- Two timed section drills, single modules under the clock. This is where pacing problems surface, and pacing is a separate skill from content.
- If you are consistently leaving questions unanswered, stop adding content this week and drill pace instead. Content you know but cannot reach is worth nothing.
Week 3: full length, then react to it
- One full-length timed test, in one sitting, at roughly the hour you will actually test.
- Spend longer reviewing it than sitting it. This is the highest-value session in the whole month.
- Two sessions aimed squarely at whatever it exposed. Not at what you planned to study, at what the test actually found.
Week 4: sharpen, then stop
- Days 22–26: re-drill your error log. Questions you have already got wrong are worth more than fresh ones, because they are the ones you demonstrably cannot do yet.
- Day 27: one final timed section, not a full test.
- Days 28–30: light review, the formula sheet, and sleep. No new material.
Cramming in the final three days reliably costs more than it adds, because it trades rest for material you will not retain anyway.
When the week goes wrong
It will. Something is due, you get ill, the week evaporates. The order to cut things in:
- Never cut the full-length test and its review. That is the spine of the plan.
- Cut new content before you cut timed practice.
- Cut a whole session rather than doing four bad ones. Two focused hours beat six distracted ones, and this is not a motivational claim, it is what the error log will show you.
If you have longer
Stretch the same shape rather than adding to it: two weeks of foundation, three of build, three of sharpen, one taper. The phases do the same jobs; they just get more room.