Hi there! I’m Jessica, I graduated from Abbotsleigh in 2025 and I’m currently studying a Bachelor of Commerce/Biomedical Engineering at UNSW!
Before I begin, I’m hoping you’re either on your L’s or already have your license, so you would know what it feels like when you first start out driving (but it’s also okay if you’re a passenger princess). The first time driving for everyone is exciting, scary, and feels unreal. And driving can take up a major portion of your time as you must fill in a whopping 120 hours in your logbook!
Studying for the HSC is like learning to drive a car. You start at an empty carpark, with an empty slate, gradually learning the essential skills like turning, speed control and reversing bit by bit, similar to you learning at school, filling up notebooks with content knowledge. Like studying, it takes up time and requires consistent effort for visible results. And the main obstacle barricading you from the liberty to drive alone, just like for Year 12, is a big test.
So how do you prepare yourself to pass that big test, to jump into real traffic after only practicing in that empty carpark?
Tip One: Find Something/Someone/Somewhere to Keep You Accountable When You Need to Lock In
You’re not alone when it comes to procrastination. There was never a time when I didn’t think to myself, ‘I still have three days until this assignment is due, I’ll finish it tomorrow’, or ‘today’s not it, I’ll drive another day’.
Of course, having no self-discipline at all is a problem, but I get it, it’s hard to discipline yourself and feel motivated every single day to get work done. Take breaks regularly, stay away from that phone, get some shut-eye.
However, for those times when you know you have to LOCK-IN-CLOCK-IN but fear that your procrastination will get the better of you: create an environment that primes your mind to enter study mode, even if your heart tells you that you really don’t want to do it.
It’s like when you’re learning to drive, you have a full-licensed driver that keeps watch of you, and you start practicing on real roads rather than that empty carpark. You feel the pressure to perform well as all these factors prime you to enter peak driving concentration.
In simple terms, you could do the following:
- Find something that will stop you from getting distracted (e.g., app blockers, ‘do not disturb’ setting, a rubber duck who watches you)
- Find someone (preferably locked in) to study with you, and promise to keep each other accountable (so you feel the pressure e.g., to not check your phone)
- Find somewhere that has minimal distractions and other locked-in people to create the physical environment for studying (e.g., Project’s Grasslands ;), libraries)
For example, I nominated a friend to study with at various university libraries. Before each study session began, we would tell each other everything that we were aiming to complete within a certain timeframe, and we made a deal that neither of us would touch our phones before we reached our goal. The idea of keeping my promise to my friend, staying concentrated like everyone else in the library (and also potentially grabbing a well-deserved treat after) really helped me stay motivated to the end of each session.
It’s kind of like learning from a driving instructor from a driving school. You can no longer just go drive whenever you please – rather, you have to commit to consistent lessons and fully concentrate in every session because your every move and decision is being watched.
Look, it might sound like a lot, but don’t knock it ‘til you try it!
Tip Two: Hot Take But…
I remember around the time when apps like YPT and Forest became super popular. I myself thought the concept of these apps were innovative and would help me significantly with my ability to focus and to not be distracted by my phone, and so I was very excited to start using it with my friends.
YPT has a unique feature where you can create groups, so that you can see when your friends are studying in real time and how long they’ve been studying for. When I first began using the app, studying became so much more fun as it felt like playing a minigame, and I gained motivation from the idea that our YPT group was like a study room and the thought that we were all in this together.
However, as time passed, I began noticing little issues with this method of studying:
Time vs. Productivity
Say you’ve logged more than an hour on YPT so far, but you’ve only managed to do one 4U exam question because you ended up getting distracted with a book or with other things on your laptop. Sure, you’ve technically been doing maths for an hour, but it wasn’t productive! Then, you might be tricked when you look back at the number of hours that you’ve accumulated on YPT throughout the day, thinking that you’ve spent so long studying when in fact you might not have been as efficient as you thought.
If you find yourself unintentionally doing this, what’s stopping others from doing the same?
Comparison Hub
Seeing your peers consistently getting 14+ hours of study done per day (which probably wasn’t all productive) would understandably attract a lot of unwanted stress and the feeling like you haven’t studied enough. It’s a game, but at a certain point that game turns into heavy competition and comparison of yourself to others’ capacities and abilities. You start to feel unnecessary pressure to increase your hours or even to be on top of the leaderboard.
So, ironically, unlike logging in hours of driving for your L’s, only keeping track of the time you spend studying might not be the best solution to increase efficiency!
Instead, try pairing it with a daily to-do list or a weekly schedule. To this day, I like to write my tasks down with the time that I’m aiming to take to complete them. It’s important to treat YPT as one kind of tool to help you focus, rather than solely relying on it.
In short, stick to your daily plan and don’t compare yourself to others – everyone goes at their own pace!
Tip Three: Target Areas of Weakness
When I first started driving, I SUCKED at reverse parallel parking. I never got the angle and distance right, and I would always JUST miss scraping the car in front 😨. For those who drive, I’m sure there were also certain aspects of driving that you weren’t so confident in when you first started (and maybe you’re still working on them!). In any case, there’s no doubt that we all had no choice but to put in effort to improve those skills for the driving test.
It’s the same with studying – you have strengths, but there are also areas where you need to improve. For example, I used to dread doing probability and combinatorics questions for 3U because I basically got every question wrong. I tried to avoid the topic as much as possible in the short term, but I knew it couldn’t be avoided for the HSC.
So, rather than aimlessly speed-running through practice papers and losing marks in the same types of questions every time, here’s a little formula to launch yourself towards the target:
Step 1: Review The Basics
Sometimes, it’s not because all the questions you come across are necessarily hard, but because you haven’t fully grasped the core idea of the topic and WHY you’re learning it. So, before you jump into doing more questions, go back and review the concept or the foundational skills of the topic, whether it be explanations using particle theory vs Le Chatelier’s Principle in Chemistry or projectile motion in 3U.
Step 2: Compile Wrong Questions
Ensure you fully understand the explanations/solutions to all the questions you’ve gotten incorrect, then collect them in a Word document or something similar (without the answers). This will be useful later!
Step 3: Targeted Practice
If you’ve found that your weakness lies in foundational knowledge, start with standard problems e.g. redo textbook questions and first self-marked section in Project homeworks. Then, the KEY to unlocking full potential in targeted practice is to do those wrong questions that you’ve saved, over, and over, and over again, so that you not only fully understand the solution given but also know how to get to the answer by yourself. When you start to get the hang of it, you will have understood how to actually apply the concept to different questions and scenarios. After all this, you can move onto harder, more abstract problems.
Without having a specific goal to work towards, doing practice exams/questions can feel meaningless and take away from your motivation to improve your understanding.
Remember:
Year 12 is so much more than just studying – it’s also a time to cherish old memories, strengthen connections and make new memories that will last a lifetime. But, when you’re in need of a little push, you’re always welcome to come back and visit, I’ll always be here cheering you on no matter what!
Like muscle memory with driving, you never truly forget everything you’ve learnt from your high school studies - make sure to appreciate the opportunity that you have to learn about the world!
Have fun, nothing is ever THAT deep, and I’ll see you on the other side of HSC 😆
