Very few people have a “natural” Chemistry ability. Most people, in fact, start on an absolutely level playing field when it comes to Year 12 Chemistry. Therefore, Chemistry is anyone’s subject. What will decide how well you do, and whether or not you top the subject, is how successfully you employ various study techniques throughout your year. These are my top tips: Give them a go, and I promise you that you’ll see better results in your Trials and beyond.
Summarise chemistry at the end of every week
It’s super easy to fall behind in the Chemistry curriculum. There are just so many (often random and totally unrelated) dotpoints that you will cover in class; even missing one or two can be fatal. There is no way to tell when one of the tiny dotpoints, or a single prac, is worth 8 marks in your HSC exam.
It’s hard to stay motivated throughout the year. But if you regularly set aside a time to summarise Chemistry, once a week, I promise that you won’t regret it. Making sure that you keep up to date with your learning, keeping a collated document with everything you need to know for your HSC, will make your journey through this subject so, so much easier. Even just writing down difficult Chemical terms (Aluminium silicate catalyst, Zeolite etc.) makes it so much easier to memorise them.
When summarising chemistry, use colours.
Make sure to allocate certain colours to have certain meanings (important chemical equations, extra information that you don’t necessarily need to memorise etc.). Just taking that little bit of extra time assessing how you are going to structure your notes will make them much, much more effective. Set your notes out in the smartest possible way. If you can use a table, use a table. If you can use dotpoints, use dotpoints. If you can include a diagram, include a diagram.
This is particularly important, as the same goes for answering actual assessment questions. If you can answer in an advantages/disadvantages table, you should! By setting your notes out such that you can literally transplant them into answering difficult HSC-style questions, you are far more likely to retain the information. Think of it as a neurological trick: if you’ve looked over an answer a few times, it would be far easier to remember the information if you write it down in the order, and the style, that you read it!
Keep a separate list of VITAL chemistry equations
This is something that I only did at the end of my HSC. I would write a list of the information I absolutely HAD to memorise, and just hadn’t yet. Then, I would do my best to learn the information, see what I could cross off my list, and then do it again. By the time it got to my actual Chemistry HSC examination, this is the only document I was studying from.
Whilst that will certainly make less sense to you than it did for me, the idea is compiling all of the information you ABSOLUTELY need to remember, so that you can study more effectively. You should aim to be doing this in every single subject.
Use worksheets
Now that you have the list of difficult information, how do you actually memorise it? In my opinion, there are two ways. Firstly, just answering a shit-tonne of actual questions. Answer questions applying the information you are trying to learn, first with the aid of the one-page cheat sheet, and later without it.
Secondly, write yourself worksheets applying the information. Create worksheets with blank spaces where you need to fill in the important information (whether that be statistics, chemical equations, or anything else!). Photocopy the worksheets a hundred times, fill it in five times a day. If you start doing that soon, you’ll know absolutely EVERYTHING by your half-yearlies, and be able to recite it in your sleep by the HSC exams. If you want a more detailed explanation of worksheets, I have explained how I used them in relation to Modern History here (the explanation is just as applicable to Chemistry). For an example of the worksheets, I have attached what I used for Modern History (obviously you would want to make them Chemistry-related) in the linked thread.
Do chemistry past papers
Past papers. Do them. Do them again. Do them again and again and again.
Your teacher might not give you practice papers for your Half-Yearlies. If they don’t, seriously just do past HSC papers. If they do give you past papers for your Half-Yearlies, and you run out, do past HSC papers. If you run out of past HSC papers, do them again. And again. Both the questions and the answers are available FOR FREE on the Board of Studies website (http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/hsc_exams/). Scroll through and answer ANY question related to the topics that you will be assessed on in your half yearlies. I promise you that MOST of the questions you will be asked in your half-yearlies, trials and HSC have been asked before in past years. By doing questions, you get a jump on the actual task that you will sit, and it’s also the best way of figuring out which areas you need to build your knowledge of.
I really hope this helps you in your Chemistry journey! If you have any questions, about Chemistry or any other subject, be sure to head over to the relevant forums for some free online tutoring and ask some questions! These can be on the content itself, general study tips, literally anything at all! This community is growing, fast, and there are so many individuals out there waiting to help, and be helped, by you.
