The HSC is the culmination of 13 years of schooling. Everything you’ve done in pre-school to set you up for primary school, everything in primary school to set you up for high school, everything in high school to set you up for the HSC (for the people who want to sit it). As such, a lot of pressure is placed on us as students to do well. And sure, our teachers teach us the content. And they do it well. But there is so much more to succeeding in the HSC than JUST knowing your stuff. This is what this guide is for. I want to give you my best tips, some my own and some from others, that helped me achieve what I did in the HSC. If I can achieve a 99 ATAR, you can too.

I suppose I should give you some background before I start. Went to an awesome Catholic school in Western Sydney. I took English Advanced, Music 1, Mathematics and Extension 1, Studies of Religion, Physics and Legal Studies. I have a wonderful girlfriend of 6 and a half years, and I worked part time all through my HSC too.

I’m not mentioning these things because I feel like giving an autobiography. I want to remove a stereotype. I didn’t go to one of the “prestigious” city schools. Didn’t take the typical subject combination for a high achiever. Didn’t lock myself away to study all da! But look what I achieved. 99.80 ATAR, state rank in Legal Studies, included in Encore for Music 1, and now attending UNSW on a Coop Scholarship for Electrical Engineering.

The point I’m trying to make is, I didn’t do anything no one else could do. In fact, I’ll admit I am probably more of a procrastinator than a lot of people, definitely not as smart as other people out there. The key to success in the HSC is simple. Hard work. If you work hard, you will succeed.  There is no two ways about it. Of course, there are a whole bunch of things you can do to make it easier on yourself too.

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My biggest tips to people doing the HSC is to stay motivated. Working hard for 2 years for an exam so far away is really hard. I know that, especially in Year 11, I put stuff off, knowing the actual exams were so far away. But the people who do well in the HSC are the ones who stay motivated to succeed. And there are a number of ways to do this. Think of WHY you want to succeed in the HSC, and work to that. Need to get into a medicine course? Go do some volunteering at a hospital. Keen to ace an interview for the Conservatorium? Write music during your breaks. Keep reminding yourself why you are working so hard. And keep a lolly jar on your desk. Eat a lolly after every hour of study. Any little things to make your brain realise that study is rewarding.

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I often talk about momentum, and people ask, “What are you on about?” What I mean by momentum is simple; if you do well in one task, you’ll do better in the next. You ride the confidence and let it motivate you. So a big tip: Don’t ignore the small stuff! Obviously, it is important to keep your rank as high as possible, yada yada yada, but more importantly, if you hit HSC with no prior success, you won’t be as confident and wont do as well. Try and work consistently throughout Year 12 at least.

Don’t Worry About Scaling and Subjects

I’m not even going to give this section more than a sentence or two; seriously, don’t worry about it. My subjects are anything but high scaling. But I enjoyed them, I worked hard at them, and thus I did well. It’s that simple. Anyone who says you need to do Maths Extension 2 and all the sciences to get a 99+ ATAR is lying to you.

Right, so that was some of the more psychological stuff, now for some more mechanical tips.

Study Notes

Believe it or not, there is an art to creating study notes which are effective. And it is different for every subject. But what I will highly recommend is to write study notes as you go through the course! The last thing you want is to spend half of September before HSC or July before Trials writing them out. That is study, but there is better things to do with your time. One hour a weekend putting everything you’ve learnt for the week into a document is a lot nicer than a whole weekend scratching something together.

For Math, I actually advise against study notes. It’s a skill based subject, and so you should hone the skill. Instead, draw up big formula sheets and stick them where you will see them. If you know your formulas and practice, then you will be extremely prepared.

For English, I again recommend against long and detailed study notes. Quote sheets and very quick summaries of context, plot characters etc, are much more effective than a 10 page breakdown of the Elizabethan context. English essays are all about text knowledge and analysis, and that’s quotes, lots of them.

For the sciences, I’d go back to the detail. Especially for difficult concepts. Having a handy 60 page resource (or however long) to look at, instead of thumping through a textbook or a messy notebook, works wonders, and writing the notes themselves is an awesome way to make it stick. To complement this, create a key list of terms and definitions to study… Knowing your terminology is half the battle in a science course.

For the HSIEs, again, make sure you have enough detail so that you never have to look at a textbook once they are finished. Complement this with summary sheets (for Legal, I had the entire Family and World Order subjects summarised in a page) for quick study.

The biggest mistake people make is thinking that study notes should take more time than the study itself. These notes should save you time by creating a single handy resource to refer to during your other, actual methods of study. They should not take any time around your exam blocks which could be used practicing questions!

Overcoming Procrastination

Ahh, the biggest scourge of a HSC student’s existence. I’m a self admitted procrastinator; Youtube was my biggest weakness. It sits so innocently in the corner of your study! Thankfully, there are lots of things to do to overcome procrastination. To overcome the urge to surf the web, there are actually programs you can download to block your access for an hour. Just set it up before you study. In general, I’m a big fan of the Pomodoro techniques and timers, which basically centre around small goals with lots of really small breaks in between. For example, I’d set myself half an hour to finish a section of study notes, or an essay, and then let myself have ten minutes to watch Youtube videos. There are lots of Pomodoro timer apps available for your laptop/tablet/phone, I highly recommend them.

Help Others (and Get Help)

There is a massively easy way to make content stick in the HSC. Teach it to other people. And equally, have it taught to you. HSC is best attacked collaboratively! Yes, you get ranked against your classmates, but for the HSC, you want everyone to do well (for complicated scaling reasons). Help each other, take advantage of resources like the awesome ones available on this site , and keep yourself involved in the HSC community. Trust me, it will massively help in more ways than I could even think of.

Trials

My biggest piece of advice, do NOT stress about your mark for HSC Trials if it isn’t what you expect. And this goes for any test, really.

My half yearly exam for Extension 1 in Year 12 was a doozy. I remember coming out and feeling the absolute worst I ever had after an exam. My result reflected this, but rather than angering/stressing me, it woke me up. Sometimes, a bad result is the kick you need to shift into high gear, and ride the momentum through HSC (yes, back to the momentum thing). If you do well, awesome, ride the momentum, build on that confidence and you’ll be in an awesome spot for HSC. If not, it doesn’t matter, because you have a whole 2 months to build that momentum back again! Trials are your measuring stick, don’t be stressed by them, learn from them.

How to Study!

People asked me a lot how much to study. This is a difficult question; the amount of study appropriate for each person depends on heaps, and you should work on figuring out what kind of study you need to get the results you want. You might only need an hour a day!

However, I believe that you’ll never look back on the month before HSC and think, “Oh, I wish I’d studied LESS.” Therefore, obviously, study as much as you possibly can without going insane. For me, this was 9 hours a day five days a week during the HSC period, a bit less on weekend. This may seem too much; it’s just what I felt like I wanted/needed. I would say a solid school day worth of work (so 5 hours) would be HEAPS to get lots of practice in for the HSC.

So what study do you actually do? Simple. Past papers, and lots of them. 90% of your study should be attempting past papers, in exam conditions if you can, though going through Physics papers with my notes by my side helped me a lot in the first couple of weeks. How many should you do? As many as you can; I personally managed to complete every past HSC paper for Mathematics and Extension 1 from 1991 (or whenever the Success One books start), so about 45 past papers. About 15 for Physics, the same for Legal, a whole bunch of essays taken from English Papers plus about half a dozen practice exams, etc. A lot. I attribute my success to doing as many past papers as I did; nothing surprised me and I was ready for every question.

However, doing this many past papers is definitely a very hard thing to do. And I got lucky with how my timetable worked to allow lots of time to do practice between exams. There are two things I recommend for completing past papers, but in a way which is a bit “smarter” than what I did:

First method. Grab a past paper, and set a timer for about 15 minutes. Your job in that 15 minutes is to read through the paper, and if you read a question and don’t know how you would answer it, mark it. So basically, look at every question and think honestly to yourself, “Could I answer that?”. If the answer is no, mark it. At the end, you just do every marked question. This makes study more efficient because you aren’t attempting questions you already know how to do. Also, you can shorten the time to get good practice for how to use reading time!

Second method: The second technique is better suited to someone struggling with the content. Set yourself a set of past papers. It could be 10, 20, all of them, pick however many you think you’ll get done. Do them under exam conditions, one by one, on a set schedule. Mark them as you go, and jot down the question numbers you get wrong. After they are all done, look at the questions you mixed up. Is there a theme? Revise the areas of issue and now attempt only the marked questions. Is there an improvement?

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The final question I get asked is, well, how did you schedule yourself? As I mentioned, most/all of my study was past papers. I aimed for 9 hours a day in the last month before exams, three papers per day. So I just made a timetable of which papers I’d sit and when.

A day might look like this:

• Up at 8am for breakfast and such things

• 9-12am I’d normally sit a Math paper (I found it easier to start with that than an essay), then chill out at lunch time for a couple of hours

• 2-5pm I’d normally do an essay style subject like English or Legal, relax and have dinner for a few hours

• 6:30-9:30 I’d work on another math paper, Physics paper, or some practice for Music aural.

• The weekends I’d normally give myself the nights off, after spending the day doing a math paper and revising any difficult concepts I’d identified from the previous week.

So that’s what a schedule could look like. A few blocks of work, shorten them if you need to. Make sure you get plenty of breaks. Give yourself time off. And very important, don’t spend whole days working on one subject. Keep mixing it up!

The Morning of an Exam

A lot of people also ask whether I studied right before the big test. There are a variety of very different opinions on studying directly before an exam. It’s majorly a matter of preference, however, I wanted to share an experience I had at uni. I had my first big math exam, and I decided to read over my formula sheets. I noticed a weird little derivation in the bottom of one section. This same derivation proved a major part of a question which would have easily been worth almost 7-8 of my marks. Had I not peeked, they would have been out the window.

Put bluntly, I say read. Don’t practice questions, you’ll work yourself up and tire yourself out. But reading formula sheets or quote sheets is a great way to occupy your mind for subjects which it makes sense for. They channel your energy, boost your confidence, etc.

There is also the more generic stuff. Eat a good breakfast (I got bacon before my math exam, I remember it explicitly as very tasty bacon). For the sake of your ATAR, go to the bathroom, you do not want to waste a second during the exam. Also, figure out the best way to relieve stress! I find it best to move around a lot. I remember my music teachers would always notice me pacing before performances, the adrenalin just made me want to move! At uni, I even went as far as purposely getting of the bus early and walking 20 minutes to the venue. Others prefer mediation. Find what works best to have you feeling confident. And finally, my biggest piece of advice, and one which normally raises an eyebrow or two… Strut into the room.

I’m not kidding. Walk in there like you have just gotten back from landing on Mars and finding a cure for cancer. You are the most important person in the world. Be the celebrity you’ve always wanted to be. The truth is, the confidence in your body language will translate to your brain, and produce all sorts of awesome hormones and stuff like that. It loosens you up, sort of like why boxers do their moves before a big fight. To stretch of course, but the showboating serves a mental role you’ll be surprised at. Seriously, try it. Best piece of advice I received in my Prelim Year from a motivational speaker, and I love it. Makes me look like an idiot, but it’s awesome.

Exam Tips

There are absolutely hundreds of tips I could give for succeeding in the exams. But here are just a few:

For English:

• For Paper 1, don’t spend an equal amount of time on every section. Spend 45 minutes on the essay, 40-45 minutes on Section 1, and the rest on creative. And do creative LAST.

• In reading time, aim to have a plan for your essay, an idea for creative, and have these before you start reading your unseen texts.

• For Paper 2 especially, keep an eye on the clock. Try not to spend any more than 40 minutes per section. Once you hit 37 minutes, start a conclusion, no matter where you are up to.

• Again for Paper 2, do the module you like the most, first. Let the harder questions stew in your mind for a little while.

• Again for Paper 2, length does NOT matter! Well, it does, but you do NOT need to write 10 pages per essay to get a Band 6. My writing is fairly big, and I wrote six/seven pages max. Now I never requested my HSC marks in Paper 2, but this length got me a perfect score for Paper 2 in the Trial, it’s quality over quantity!

• Read your quote sheet a little bit before the exam, to keep it all fresh.

For Math:

• Do multiple choice questions first. They act as a warm up and get your juices flowing for the rest of the paper.

• If you don’t understand how to do a question within 30 seconds (I mean, totally stumped), leave it and move on. Doing it at the end means less pressure to get it done, since you’ve done everything else. Just make sure you remember to go back and, at the very least, scribble some working.

• Do working for EVERY question. Even if you aren’t really sure what you are doing. Just write some stuff. Do something! The marker will likely pay you at least a mark, maybe a couple, and that’s better than nothing.

• Read your formula sheet just before heading in. This saved me during a uni exam, you might just spot and remember a formula you need for a big question.

• Check all your answers with my favourite method, SURD! Simplest Form? Units? Rational Denominator? Does it make Sense?

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For HSIE:

• Again, do multiple choice first. It gets you warmed up.

• HSIE subjects are (for the most part) all about forming opinions, or conducting critical analyses. During the reading time, make sure your arguments for your essays are sorted and ready to go.

• Devote more time to the essays than would be recommended by the time limit. That extra few minutes can work wonders.

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For Science:

• Once again, multiple choice first. Warm ups are awesome. And in the sciences (the same for everything I suppose) the MC might even contain cues which jog your memory to answer later questions.

• Take time to plan your longer response questions. 30 seconds dot pointing your stuff will improve the structure of your piece and keep you on track.

• Science papers are designed so that you should have time to check your work, for at least a few minutes. So don’t rush your answers!

• If you find a question you don’t understand, leave it until last.

In general, exams are a big test of time management. Keep yourself moving. Be sure to maximise the time you have by keeping on task (don’t find yourself looking into the distance thinking of lovelier things… Pen to paper!), making sure you go to the bathroom before the exam, etc etc. Developing good habits and exam techniques is the difference between a good mark and a great mark.

So How Do You Get a 99 ATAR?

There is no easy answer to these sorts of questions. The students who get 99+ probably know who they are. They are the ones who go that extra mile and work that little bit harder. There is also, I believe, a small amount of luck involved (exams going your way,  questions sitting well, etc). Essentially, working hard enough to guarantee a 99+ score is a difficult feat. But it can be done. I’ll return to what I said initially, you just have to work. Shortcuts will help, obviously, but if you are aiming high, work hard. Work smart. And you will be surprised how much you can improve your results in two weeks, two months, or two years.

I could honestly give advice for pages and pages about the HSC, and I know there is things I’ve missed. But my biggest, most massive piece of advice for the HSC, don’t stress it. Yes, it’s a big thing, and yes, it’s important, but no, it doesn’t spell disaster if you don’t get the ATAR you need. Plenty of friends of mine are still chasing their dreams after missing out on the “required” score; in actuality it set them back very little, usually not at all, and in some cases even put them in a better place!

I remember this being told to me, and I ignored it, you probably will to. But trust that a time will come when the HSC isn’t a massive wall in front of you. One day, it will just be a little bump behind you. Think of days like that, not far in your future. They’ll get you through, and you’ll get where you want to go, with flying colours!

Good Luck!