How do I prepare for an exam in one week without panicking?

One week is a triage problem, not a studying problem. The least-bad plan: Day 1 (2 hours max on this): get past papers / weightage and rank topics by marks-per-hour-of-effort. High-weight + half-known topics first; high-weight + unknown second; low-weight + hard = consciously sacrificed. Guilt-free abandonment of 15% of the syllabus is a strategy, not a failure. Days 1–5: work in 90-minute blocks — learn a topic via summary/lectures at 1.5x, then immediately do questions on it from past papers. Questions ARE the studying now; you don't have time for the read-everything-first fantasy. End each day with 30 minutes writing what you remember from the whole day, book closed. Day 6: full mock under exam timing. Score it brutally. Spend the rest of the day ONLY on what bled marks. Day 7: light recall of your one-page-per-topic sheets, no new material after noon (new material on exam-eve costs confidence and buys nothing), pack, sleep 7+ hours — memory consolidation is real and an exhausted brain retrieves like a wet phone. All-nighters are the one universally losing move: whatever they add in coverage they subtract twice in recall speed. You're optimizing marks now, not knowledge — those are different games.