At first glance, the HSC looks like a colossal, daunting, and maybe even terrifying 4 weeks filled with nothing but difficult exams, stress and most likely, a lack of sleep.
But this doesn’t have to be true.
Instead, I learnt to view my HSC as a 12 year marathon that started when I entered my first class in Year 1, and ended as I walked out the exam hall of my final physics exam on a sunny day at the end of my HSC journey.
And believe me… the journey was NOT smooth.
These final 4 weeks of exams is what this arduous marathon and ALL your 12 years of hard work builds up to, a final opportunity to challenge yourself to achieve your absolute personal best and prove to everyone that you are amazing, even if you don’t think you are… and maybe even just achieve a little bit more!
So instead of being scared of the HSC, I implore you to instead embrace its challenge with stalwart determination and work diligently so that your HSC result is one you can be proud of, and possibly even one to boast to your friends about.
But what’s most important about this journey, is that you don’t have to do it alone! Here are some things to know that helped me (and should hopefully help you) to approach and overcome every exam in my high school life.
Leading Up to an Exam
Let me set the stage.
In class, you receive a notification for a Mathematics exam. On the notification, it tells you all the topics assessed, and that it’s 2 weeks in the future.
But, it’s 2 weeks away right? “It’s fine”, you think, so you procrastinate, and before you know it? The 2 weeks have passed, and you haven’t studied. Not one. Single. Bit.
Complete, and absolute disaster.
I’ll be honest, in the early stages of my high school life, some of my exams looked something like this.
Now obviously, this is not ideal, especially in the more important years such as Year 11 and 12, but nobody is expecting you to be perfect, and it’s ok to make mistakes. So how do we try and avoid this?
Well, when you get your notification, it is vital that you look over all the topics in the exam, and identify which topics you know well, but infinitely more importantly, which ones you are weak at. Whilst it feels good to practice topics you know well by easily doing entire columns of questions, you grow much more by working on the difficult and mind boggling topics that you don’t understand as well.
Obviously you need to allocate the majority of your time to learn and reinforce topics you don’t know too well, but it is also important to practice topics you do as you don’t want to make silly mistakes and lose easy marks. But don’t waste time, if the questions that you are doing for a topic you know are too easy, maybe consider doing a different topic or much harder questions!
An example study plan over two weeks for a maths exam might look like:
- Reading notification and identifying weak and strong topics
- Relearning the content of topics you’re weak at
- Practicing questions of the weak topics
- Practicing questions of strong topics (much less time doing this then practicing weak topics)
- Practicing past papers without the time pressure
- Timing myself with a past paper and trying to finish with some time to check over my work
Now this is just an overview of how I studied for my exams, but I strongly suggest you take the time to figure out what method of studying works for you, each person is different in how they learn and store knowledge so everyone will probably have different studying methods. Personally, one of the best ways I learnt content was by teaching it to others, as it forces you to understand the concept in order to be able to explain it simply.
If you are in Year 10 or 11, this is the perfect time to try out different methods for studying for exams. Experiment, see what works, see what doesn’t. Building good studying habits will hopefully stay all the way until your HSC exams and make your life a lot easier!
The Night Before and on the Day
Great! So you’ve studied and practiced and you worked incredibly hard over these 2 weeks, and now you get to the night before your exam. The most important thing I wish I took more seriously the night before your exam is getting a good night of rest.
Scientific studies have literally proved that good sleep will allow you to focus better, and also be able to recall knowledge more effectively, especially in a high pressure situation like an exam. This leads to less silly mistakes and more marks in an exam!
When I was still in high school, I didn’t value this piece of advice as much as I should have, and as a result, I often made many silly mistakes in content that supposedly I knew well. The difference between doing a test on a good night of rest versus a bad night of rest is like light and day.
A good meal is also very important! Being hungry in an exam will only increase your stress, so make sure to eat enough healthy breakfast or lunch, depending on when your exam is. Food is fuel for the brain!
Sitting an Exam
As an accelerated Chemistry student, when I was in Year 10 doing my Year 11 Chemistry exams, I would often run out of time to complete all the questions. When I got my test results back, I would see that on the questions I did complete, I didn’t get all the marks I believed I should have gotten for the questions despite knowing the content. I kept asking myself why did these things happen?
Looking back, I realised that what I lacked was my exam technique, which was mainly me managing my time poorly as well as having poor structure for my answers. As a result of my inefficient answer structure, I wrote more words than I needed to, which resulted in less time for other questions.
My take to combat these issues is that timed practice is incredibly important. As soon as I realised that this was an issue and began doing timed practice, I found that I suddenly had time at the end of the exam, which allowed me to check over my answers and correct silly mistakes, or even add detail into higher-marked questions.
I cannot overstate how important this technique is, and I guarantee that once you implement this into your study plan, your marks will increase.
As for improving answer structure, for example in Chemistry, I recommend practicing written questions the following method:
- Complete the question first as you would normally without any marking guidelines
- Then, redo the question with the marking guideline OR if it is a HSC paper, try to find a sample band 6 response (Whilst the HSC marking guidelines have sample responses, these often lack detail and could be written a lot better)
- Compare your answer with the sample answer or the answer you did with the marking guideline, and see what parts of your original answer you could have maybe cut out, or expanded upon
- Finally, without the guideline again, try to rewrite your response to be more concise or with more detail as required.
Your final goal should be to be able to write a response that precisely answers the question, and with enough detail. Try to get rid of all that waffle that eats up your exam time!
Post Exam Review
Finally, what I believe to be the most important (besides of course the final HSC exam) is actually reviewing your exam. From the previous tips, they help you to learn the content, practice the questions, improve your time management, improve the quality of responses, etc.
And whilst it is all important, and following these steps should lead to results, we are all human, and we aren’t perfect.
That’s why, no matter how much practice you do, mistakes likely will be inevitable, and that’s perfectly ok! So, the best thing to do after an exam is to do a complete review of your exam, focusing mainly on any mistakes you made or questions you dropped marks in.
What I did after every math exam was look over it and redo any questions I lost marks in. After making sure I was familiar with the method to solve the question or the mistake I made, I compiled them into a document or ‘mistake bank’ which I came back to whilst studying for every exam. I strongly recommend doing this for every subject possible.
You Aren’t Alone
The HSC may seem like it’s an individual journey, but if there’s anything that my cohort at Normo taught me, it was the ‘Team Normo spirit’. Now what does this mean?
It means that, no matter what, us fellow Normanhurst students stand up for each other, and help each other in times of need. This meant we shared studying resources, past papers, notes, textbooks… we even held recess and even lunchtime seminars where we went over Math questions, English essay scaffolds and so much more.
We as a cohort created an environment where we all tried to help each other do the best we can, because we would all benefit in the end.
So if you can, try to get your cohort or even group of friends to have this sort of ‘spirit’, where everybody lifts each other up to reach their full potential, instead of the top students keeping their resources in an attempt to maintain their rank.
So hey, if you know somebody struggling, reach out to them, and share this guide!
Good luck!
