"For outstanding results in international exams, thorough preparation starting at least a year ahead is essential. I recommend students begin in Year 11."
— Dr. Georgiana Popovici, in a press interview (in Romanian)
Why a year, and not three months
Not because the syllabus cannot be covered faster. Because a year is what it takes to fit in three things that otherwise do not fit at all:
- a backup sitting. If the first attempt does not go well, you still have another before the application deadline. Three months out, you do not;
- repairing old gaps. Most marks lost in international exams do not come from this year's material, but from something left half-understood two or three years earlier;
- time for the application itself. The last months before a UCAS deadline go on the personal statement, references and forms. Learning the subject at the same time means doing both badly.
The deadlines you actually have to work around
A-Level and IGCSE exam series
Cambridge International runs two main series a year: June and November (plus a March series in India). Edexcel International A Level runs three: January, summer and October.
The difference matters when you plan: with Edexcel you can resit a unit four months later; with Cambridge you wait half a year.
SAT dates for the 2026–2027 school year
College Board has published eight dates, which apply to international candidates as well:
| Autumn 2026 | Spring 2027 |
|---|---|
| 22 August 2026 | 6 March 2027 |
| 12 September 2026 | 1 May 2027 |
| 3 October 2026 | 5 June 2027 |
| 7 November 2026 | |
| 5 December 2026 |
Registration closes well before the test date, so check the deadline for the sitting you want.
UK applications (UCAS), for 2027 entry
- 1 September 2026 — applications can be submitted;
- 15 October 2026, 18:00 UK time — deadline for Oxford and Cambridge, and for most courses in medicine, veterinary medicine and dentistry;
- 13 January 2027, 18:00 UK time — the equal consideration deadline for everything else.
Notice what that means: if you are aiming at Oxbridge or medicine, your application leaves in October — so your grades and scores must already exist, or be predictable, by the summer before.
The timeline, counted backwards from the exam
12 months out — Year 11 or early Year 12
This stage is diagnosis, not revision. Which components you are sitting (the Cambridge combination of four papers differs from school to school), where the gaps from previous years are, what grade or score your target programme needs. This is also when you decide whether you are adding the SAT, because that changes the rest of the plan.
9 months out
The hard content, at a steady pace — one session a week is enough if there is independent work between sessions. For A-Levels that means calculus and the statistics or mechanics component. For the SAT it means repairing the basics: percentages, systems, functions, reading graphs.
6 months out
The first full timed paper under real conditions. Not for the mark, but to see where the time goes. The result is usually worse than the student expected — and that is precisely the information you sat it for.
3 months out
Past papers, one after another, marked against the official mark scheme. This is where the difference between "I can solve it" and "I get the marks" appears: Cambridge and Edexcel award method marks, and students who skip steps lose marks on questions they solved correctly.
The final month
No new material. Only the mistakes that keep repeating, and pace. For the SAT, drill the first module — on an adaptive test, how you do there decides how high the second module lets you go.
If you have less time than that
It can be done, with different goals. Three months out you are not recovering three years of gaps; you pick the topics that carry the most marks and you work on exam technique. Both situations are common enough to state the difference plainly: what separates a student who starts in Year 11 from one who starts in the final term is not how much they know, but how many options they have left if something goes wrong.
What happens next
Preparation is taught in groups, in person in Bucharest or online, in two-hour sessions, at the same prices for every exam. The schedule follows an initial assessment: what you are sitting, when, and what you need to achieve.
If your exam is in the June 2027 series, the time for that assessment is now — not in spring.
Official sources used in this article: