Picture this: You are sitting in the exam hall, completing your technology-active maths exam. You turn the page and see a question that you have no idea how to do. You stare at it for a while, wondering how the question looks so familiar yet so difficult. Then it hits you: you’ve struggled with a very similar question before, and you have the method written in your reference book. You quickly find it and complete the question easily. Phew.
Your maths bound reference is one of the most useful tools that you will have throughout the year. It not only helps you in your exam, the process of creating it helps you consolidate information. However, it is important that you make it work for YOU.
Here are some tips to help you make a perfect bound reference.
What should you include in your bound reference?
Before you jump into the tips, here’s a list of things that you can consider having in your bound reference.
- Content that you don’t fully understand as well as topic summaries
- Key formulas (ones that are not on your formula sheet - there’s no use repeating what you already have)
- Plenty of worked examples
- Working out to past exam questions (especially those ‘separator questions’ that most students found difficult)
- Common mistakes you make for each topic
- Important calculator commands
Tip #1: Make sure it fits VCAA’s guidelines
There’s no point in making a great bound reference if you can’t take it into your exam. You need to make sure it fits within VCAA’s strict guidelines, which you can find on this page.
Here’s some key points.
- The book must be A4 sized or smaller
- It must not include any fold outs or tabs
- It must not include any detachable pages (no perforations)
- Anything stuck into the book must be firmly attached
Tip #2: Ensure that the book has enough pages
Your bound reference can have as many pages as you like, but before you start yours, make sure you have enough pages. If you run out of pages, it becomes very difficult to stick multiple books together! 128 pages is a good amount, or if you feel like you don’t need a lot 96 page book may suffice. Anything less is a little risky – you’d rather have leftover pages than not enough.
Tip #3: Have a contents page
It is vital that you make your bound reference easy to navigate. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time flipping pages to find what you need. Constructing a contents page will make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
Make sure you do this as you go through – having to write 50+ page numbers in one go is a very tedious task! Once you fill in a page, write the page number and add it to the contents straight away.
Tip #4: Don’t clutter it with unnecessary information
If you know exactly how to solve an algebraic equation or add two matrices together, and know you won’t forget it, don’t write it your book. This is just going to clutter it with unnecessary information and make it harder for you to locate what’s important. Additionally, you don’t want to waste time writing what you know.
Just add what you need.
Tip #5: Use colour!
Making a bound reference is a fun task – you can really get creative with it! Colour coding topics and sections is a great way to make things stand out and easier to find.
Perhaps you will write all your worked examples in green, and formulas in red. Maybe you can colour code each topic by Area of Study, or highlight the topics you struggle the most with.
Tip #6: Work on it throughout the year
There is no worse feeling than getting to the end of Term 3 and realising that your bound reference has nothing in it. It is not easy to whip one up in less than two weeks! After you finish learning the content you should be doing practise questions, not spending hours making your reference book.
Therefore, make sure you add to it throughout the year. It might be useful to get into a habit of adding to it weekly. After you finish a topic, you should also go back and add anything that you may have missed.
Tip #7: Have worked examples
In your maths exam, you will not really be asked any content questions. Since you will be solving maths problems, having worked examples in your reference book is very important. Make sure you cover a variety of different types of questions per topic. You don’t need two questions which are the same apart from the numbers used.
When writing out worked examples, make sure the steps are very clear. You don’t want to be working out what’s happening in each step during your exam! Annotating each step with words may help with this.
Tip #8: Know which pages you need the most
You will definitely have pages in your bound reference that you will need more than others. The page that you wrote at the very beginning of the year about solving algebraic equations may not be so useful to you at exam time.
Maybe there’s a worked example on the binomial distribution or a formula that you refer to often. Make sure you know how to get to this page quickly! You can cut the corner of the page, colour in the margin a bright colour or fold the page (but no sticky notes!).
Tip #9: Practise using your bound reference
There’s no point in spending the entire year creating a bound reference if you aren’t skilled at navigating it. You don’t want to spend five minutes during your exam trying to find a formula! When you do practise exams make sure to use your bound reference and get the hang of locating things quickly.
Hopefully you found these tips useful! Your bound reference is such a useful tool if you have made it well, so make sure you give it the attention it deserves.
