The method

Your plan is not a
guess.

Most study apps hand you an empty calendar and wish you luck. PeakScore decides what goes in it, and the decisions come from research on how memory actually works, not from what feels productive. Here are the four findings the schedule is built on, what each one measured, and the exact place in the app where it is applied.

An honest caveat first. These are findings from controlled studies, mostly with students, on material like yours. They are strong and they replicate. They are not a promise about your grades, and anyone who gives you a guaranteed percentage is selling something. What they do justify is this: how you revise matters more than how long, and the ordering below is not arbitrary.
Principle 01

Testing yourself beats reading it again

Re-reading is the default because it feels like it is working. The page gets familiar, familiarity feels like knowing, and you close the book confident. Then the test asks you to produce the answer with nothing in front of you, which is a different skill entirely, and one you never practised.

Pulling something out of your memory is harder than putting it back in front of your eyes. That difficulty is not a sign it is going badly. It is the thing that makes the memory hold.

In PeakScore
Every scheduled review is worded as a recall, not a reread: Recall Biology: 10 min, book closed. Your SAT mistakes go to an error log that asks you to name the rule you broke, not to re-read the explanation.
Recall one week later
Studied once, then self-tested61%
Re-read four times40%
Roediger & Karpicke (2006), Test-Enhanced Learning, Psychological Science 17(3). Students read a passage, then either re-read it or tested themselves on it. Re-reading won after five minutes. A week later, it lost badly.
Principle 02

Spread out beats piled up

Five hours the night before a test and five hours spread across two weeks are not the same five hours. The second version produces a memory that is still there a month later; the first produces one that is largely gone by the following week, which is inconvenient given that the next test builds on it.

This is the single most reliable finding in the whole field. It has been replicated for decades, across ages, subjects and time scales.

In PeakScore
One topic per study day, and the gap before it comes back grows every time you recall it: a day, then three, then a week, then a fortnight, then a month. Tell it you are still shaky and it returns tomorrow instead, while the material is fresh. A subject you flagged as hard climbs the same ladder on a shorter rope. Test prep is broken into dated topic blocks across the run-up rather than one session the night before, and the calendar fills the empty days, because empty days are where cramming comes from.
The evidence base
Studies reviewed254
Participants14,000+
Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer (2006), Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks, Psychological Bulletin 132(3). A synthesis of 254 studies. Spaced practice beat massed practice consistently, and the longer you need to remember something, the bigger the gap should be.
Principle 03

Mixed practice beats one thing at a time

Doing twenty questions of the same type in a row feels excellent. By question five you are fast, and speed feels like mastery. But you are not choosing a method any more, you are repeating one, and the test will not tell you which method to use.

Mixing the types is slower and more uncomfortable in the moment. It also happens to be the thing the exam is actually testing.

Both SAT foundation phases run Reading and Writing and Maths together, leaning toward whichever is weaker, rather than teaching one for a month while the other goes cold. Your school review rotates across subjects instead of parking on one.
In PeakScore
Maths test, one week later
Practised mixed63%
Practised one type at a time20%
Rohrer & Taylor (2007), The Shuffling of Mathematics Problems Improves Learning, Applied Cognitive Psychology 21. Both groups did identical problems. Only the order differed. During practice the blocked group looked far better; a week later they did not.
Principle 04

Most of what students call revising is the weak option

Ten common study techniques were rated on how well they hold up across subjects, ages and test types. Two came out strong. The ones almost everyone actually uses came out near the bottom, not because they do nothing, but because they take real hours and return very little for them.

Practice testing
High utility. Works across subjects, ages and formats.
Distributed practice
High utility. The other one that survived every test.
Highlighting
Low utility. Feels like work. Marks the page, not the memory.
Re-reading
Low utility. Builds familiarity, which is easily mistaken for knowing.
Summarising
Low utility for most students, unless already trained in it.
Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham (2013), Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14(1).
Why this compounds

Cramming has a ceiling, and the exam that matters sits above it

You can cram a Friday vocabulary quiz. Twenty words, learned Thursday night, still there on Friday morning. It works, which is exactly why students keep doing it, and why it feels like a strategy rather than a bet.

Then comes the exam that does not fit in one night. The IB finals cover two years of six subjects at once. ENEM is the whole of secondary school in two days. A-Levels, Selectividad, the Vestibular, the SAT: the same shape every time. There is no Thursday night big enough, and the method that got you this far stops working precisely when the stakes go up.

The students who do well in those exams are not the ones who found more hours in the final month. They are the ones who met the material in October, again in December, again in March, so that revision in May was recognition instead of relearning. That cannot be started in May. It is a system, and a system has to be running before you need it.

Two years of IB, two ways
Studied for each test, then moved on
Finals are the first full pass. Two years, from scratch, in six weeks.
Reviewed on a rotation the whole way
Finals are the fifth or sixth pass. Six weeks of sharpening, not salvage.
Same syllabus. Same total hours. Different placement.
In PeakScore
This is why the review runs on ordinary weeks when nothing is due, and why it does not wait for you to feel behind. It is also why your terms are mapped at setup: the plan needs to know how long the year is before it can space anything across it.

This is the whole difference.

A planner records what you have to do. PeakScore decides when you should meet it again, in what order, and how. That is the part you cannot do for yourself while you are in the middle of a school year, because it needs you to plan against your own instincts.

You can override any of it. Move a session, skip a review, change your pace. The schedule is a default built on the evidence, not a rule you have to obey.

Build my space
References
Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35, 481–498.
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.