We’ve all heard it before: the best way to improve your maths is to do past papers (and if you didn’t know this, now you do!). However, sometimes this is no easy task – we have to set aside a large chunk of our time to just complete a single, gruelling paper – and when trials come around, these papers take up to three hours to complete! And as a result, not wanting to do past papers has been a major source of procrastination during my HSC year. But what if I told you that doing past papers did not need to be this painful?

Here’s my proposition: at first, do all your past papers one question at a time – do all the question 1’s amongst all the papers, then all the question 2’s, and so on.

What are the benefits?

First of all, by breaking your past papers up into smaller chunks, you are not required to set aside so much time to do each paper. This means if you have, say, 20 minutes before dinner, you can just complete one question without needing to worry about doing the rest.

However, the main benefit comes from the better progression of difficulty of the questions. In math past papers, same question numbers tend to be similar in nature (in terms of difficulty, and sometimes topics as well!). By doing all the question 1’s first, you are familiarising yourself with a wide variety of question 1’s and making sure you master that specific question before you move on. Then you can move onto mastering all the question 2’s, and so on until theoretically you have mastered every question… This means that at the very beginning, you are able to avoid the dreaded ‘last questions’ which take ages to solve and delay it until you are at a comfortable level.

Sadly, it is pretty hard to ‘master’ the final questions, but by being proficient in the first few questions, you are able to give yourself more time to do the end questions (which can often be the difference!).

A brief step-by-step guide on this method

First, you want to create a partition of past papers: one stack of past papers for applying this technique, and one smaller stack of past papers to do in fully timed exam conditions (yes, in the end we still need exam practice!). Usually, you choose the more recent past papers to do in fully timed conditions (sadly with new syllabus, there isn’t much of a choice for recency).

And now just do what I just described! Start with the multiple choice, working through all the papers in your stack and completing their multiple choice and marking them. So, when do you move onto the next question? Personally, I would stay on the same question until I can get around 90% – 100% consistently (so for example, I might already be really good at doing question 1s, so I will do only a few past papers before moving onto all the question 2s. On the other hand, I might really suck at question 4’s and do a lot of question 4’s before moving onto question 5’s). Of course, the later questions will take a lot more practice to truly get the hang of.

I know some people who did this method with me also enjoyed timing their questions as well, e.g. they know generally how long it takes for them to do each question, and if they need to speed anything up, etc.

And finally…

When you feel confident in your past-paper-taking ability, it is finally time to do past papers in a timed environment! Use this step to really focus on your time management and making use of your reading time!

This was a technique that helped me tremendously during my HSC year, and if you’re looking for new ways to innovate your studying, then give it a try and see if it works for you! I personally only did this for Maths because the benefits were more apparent to me, but I’m sure it works for other subjects as well!