The basic split

English uses do and make where many other languages have a single verb, so choosing the right one can feel like guessing. Here's the clearest way to think about it for school and studying:

• Do goes with tasks, activities, and processes — things you carry out or work through. If you can ask "Have you finished it yet?", do is usually correct.
• Make goes with creating or producing something — a thing that didn't exist before. If you can point at the result afterwards, make is usually correct.

In a school context this gives you two natural groups:

Do: do homework, do an exercise, do an exam, do research, do a course, do a degree, do well (in a test), do revision

Make: make notes, make a mistake, make progress, make an effort, make a plan, make a presentation, make a discovery

Worked examples

Look at these pairs and notice why one version is wrong:

✅ I need to do my homework before dinner. ❌ I need to make my homework before dinner.

Homework is a task you carry out, not a physical object you produce. You sit down, work through it, and finish it — that's do.

✅ She made a lot of mistakes in the spelling test. ❌ She did a lot of mistakes in the spelling test.

A mistake is something you produce (unfortunately). It comes into existence because of you, so it pairs with make.

One more, because this one catches people constantly:

✅ Have you made notes on chapter three? ❌ Have you done notes on chapter three?

Notes are a product — pages of writing that exist after you create them. Make notes, always.

The tricky overlaps

Some expressions look like they should follow the rule but don't, because they're fixed collocations — set phrases the language has simply locked in. The two that cause the most trouble at school:

• Do an exam / do a test — even though you produce written answers, the focus is on the activity of sitting the exam, so English uses do. (British English also accepts take an exam; neither variety uses make an exam.)
• Make a decision — deciding feels like a mental process, so learners reach for do. But English treats a decision as something you produce: you make it.

Also watch out for do well / do badly. These describe how you performed, not what you created, so they always take do:

✅ He did really well in his final exams. ❌ He made really well in his final exams.

The mistake B1–B2 learners make most

At this level, the single most common error is mixing up make homework and do homework. It happens because in French (faire les devoirs), Spanish (hacer los deberes), German (Hausaufgaben machen), and many other languages, the verb that translates to "make" is exactly the one used for homework. English goes the other way: homework is a duty you do, not a product you make.

A reliable trick: if the word after do/make describes an obligation or routine task at school — homework, revision, an exercise, an assignment — default to do. If it describes something you create from scratch — notes, a poster, a plan, a presentation — go with make.

When in doubt, ask yourself: Am I completing a task, or am I producing a thing? That one question will get you the right answer about 90 % of the time. The remaining 10 % are fixed expressions you simply need to memorise — and the quiz below is a good place to start.