A SWOTVAC plan for the week you actually have
Enter your units, the hours you honestly have, and your exam dates. Get a day-by-day SWOTVAC plan you can start tonight — free, and without signing up.
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Plan your SWOTVAC
List your units, pick how much time you really have, and add your exam dates. No sign-up needed.
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Six usable days, four units, and no plan
SWOTVAC is the most valuable week of semester and the most commonly wasted one. The fix is arithmetic, not willpower.
List your units and exam dates
Every unit, when the exam is, what it is worth, and whether there is a hurdle you have to clear to pass regardless of your coursework mark.
Say how many hours you really have
Shifts you cannot drop, a prac block in the middle, the commute, the days you will not study. Be honest — a plan that ignores your week is the plan you abandon.
Get a day-by-day plan for the week
Units spaced across the days, the ones most at risk first, and deliberate empty blocks so one bad afternoon does not kill the whole thing.
Whatever your uni calls the week
SWOTVAC, STUVAC, study week, study period. Same gap, same problem.
Semester 1 and semester 2 exams
The June and November exam blocks, with SWOTVAC as the hinge between the last lecture and the first exam. Usually about a week, and never as long as it looked in March.
Trimesters and summer intensives
A compressed teaching period barely gives you a SWOTVAC at all. The planner works with whatever gap you actually have rather than the one you were promised.
Nursing, med and allied health
Placement blocks eat the study weeks everyone else gets, and shifts do not move for your exam timetable. Tell the planner about the prac block and it will build around it.
Students who work
Most Australian uni students have a job, and most study plans quietly assume they do not. Put your shifts in, and the plan will fit the units around them instead of the reverse.
What SWOTVAC actually is
SWOTVAC is short for swot vacation — the class-free gap between the end of teaching and the start of the exam period at Australian universities, usually about a week. In New South Wales you are more likely to hear STUVAC, short for study vacation, and plenty of universities have quietly renamed the whole thing study week or study period in their handbooks. Whatever your uni calls it, the shape is identical: no classes, no new content, and a small number of days standing between you and a set of exams that are frequently worth more than everything else you did all semester. It is the single most valuable week of the semester. It is also, reliably, the one most students waste.
Why SWOTVAC gets wasted
The classic SWOTVAC failure is not laziness — it is arithmetic. You have four units, roughly six usable days, and a mental model that quietly assumes twelve focused hours a day, which nobody in the history of universities has actually done. So day one goes on building a colour-coded schedule and re-reading week one of the unit you like most, because that is the pleasant part. By Thursday you notice you have not opened the unit you are actually at risk of failing, the plan no longer matches reality, and it gets abandoned. The fix is unglamorous: start from the hours you genuinely have, allocate them to units in proportion to what is at stake, and put the unit you have been avoiding on day one, while you still have the energy to discover how far behind you are.
Weight your units by what is actually at risk
Not every exam deserves an equal share of the week. A final worth 60 per cent in a unit you are scraping a pass in is a completely different problem from a final worth 30 per cent in a unit where you have already banked a distinction — and a hurdle requirement, where you must pass the exam to pass the unit no matter how good your coursework mark is, changes the calculation entirely. Before you plan a single session, write down three things for each unit: what the exam is worth, what mark you are carrying into it, and whether there is a hurdle. Then let the plan follow from that rather than from which unit feels nicest to open. Put the weightings and the hurdles into the planner above and it will do this reasoning for you.
Six days of re-reading is six days lost
The activity that makes SWOTVAC feel most productive — sitting with the lecture slides open for nine hours — is close to the least effective way to spend it. Retrieval practice, where you try to produce the answer before you check it, and spacing that practice across days rather than massing it into one heroic session, are two of the most reliably supported findings in the learning literature. Both are inconvenient, because both require you to have something to be tested with, and making the questions is work. That is exactly why most people default to re-reading. Upload your lecture recordings, slides, or notes and Scholarly writes the cue cards, quizzes and practice questions for you, each one cited back to the part of your material it came from. Then a SWOTVAC session has a task in it rather than a vibe.
Plan the sleep, the food, and the day it all goes wrong
Every SWOTVAC plan should contain at least one deliberately empty block, because your week will go wrong and a plan with no slack turns a single bad afternoon into an abandoned plan. Sleep is not the thing to trade away either: the consolidation you are relying on — turning what you studied on Monday into something you can still retrieve on Friday — happens while you are asleep, so an all-nighter is a withdrawal from the account you are trying to fill. Nor is it clever to schedule a week you cannot eat during. Tell the planner about the shifts you cannot drop, the days you will not study, and the prac block sitting in the middle of it, and it will build around them rather than pretending they do not exist. A modest plan you finish beats a heroic one you abandon on Wednesday.
Keep exploring
Give the plan something to do
A plan tells you when. These turn your lectures, slides and PDFs into what you actually do in the session.
Revision timetable maker
The same planner, framed for school exams, subjects, and papers rather than uni units.
AI study schedule generator
Plan a whole semester rather than a single class-free week.
Revision notes generator
Condense a lecture PDF or a semester of notes into revision notes you can actually learn from.
Cue cards online
Make cue cards from your own notes and test yourself with active recall.
HSC revision
For NSW school students: trials, syllabus dot points, and a 50:50 internal-external mark.
VCE revision
For Victorian school students: SACs, study scores, and Units 3 and 4.
SWOTVAC questions
Is this SWOTVAC planner free?
Yes. You can build a SWOTVAC plan on this page without signing up or entering a card. A free Scholarly account adds the study material itself — cue cards, quizzes and notes generated from your own lecture recordings, slides and PDFs.
What is the difference between SWOTVAC and STUVAC?
Mostly geography. SWOTVAC — from swot vacation — is the more common term in Victoria and Queensland, while STUVAC, from study vacation, is heard more in New South Wales. Many universities now officially call it study week or a study period instead. They all describe the same thing: the class-free gap between the end of teaching and the start of exams.
How many hours a day should I study during SWOTVAC?
Fewer than the plan in your head is telling you. Six or seven genuinely focused hours a day, with real breaks and a full night of sleep, is a strong SWOTVAC. Twelve is a fantasy that collapses by Wednesday and takes the rest of the plan with it. Enter the hours you will actually do, and the plan will fit your units into them rather than the other way around.
Which unit should I start with?
The one you have been avoiding, on day one, while you still have the energy to find out how far behind you really are. Order the rest by what is at stake: the exam weighting, the mark you are carrying into it, and whether there is a hurdle you must clear to pass the unit at all.
Can it plan around my shifts and a prac block?
Yes — that is what the preferences box is for. Tell it about work, placement, training, a long commute, or the days you will not study, and it will build the plan around them. A plan that ignores your real week is the plan you abandon.
What should I actually do in each session?
Something you can get wrong. Re-reading slides feels like studying and mostly is not. Test yourself instead: make cue cards from your notes, generate a quick quiz from the lecture, or condense a week of content into a summary in your own words. Scholarly builds all of those from your own material, so a session has a task in it rather than a vague instruction to revise.
Does it work for trimesters and summer intensives?
Yes. Compressed teaching periods often give you barely any SWOTVAC at all. Set a short window, list your units and exam dates, and the plan will prioritise what is most at risk rather than pretending there is time for everything.
Is what I enter private?
Nothing you enter into the planner is published to other students, and the same is true of anything you later upload. Scholarly is not a note-sharing site. Nothing you upload is published to other students, added to a public library, or made searchable by anyone else — your workspace is yours, and that is the core difference from note-sharing platforms. For the full detail of how Scholarly handles uploaded content, including data use and retention, read our privacy policy.
Now give the plan something to do
A plan tells you when to study. Scholarly turns your lecture recordings, slides and PDFs into the cue cards, quizzes and notes you study from.
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