The thing with Year 12 is that you only do it once. That means that you can’t really improve on your mistakes or develop your strengths the next time because, well, there is no next time! So a lot of students around this time of year start questioning how much they should be studying – and, more generally, how they should be studying. Like, should you be considering exams?!
Exams are roughly 4-5 months away. A fair while still, but that time will creep up on you. Like a lot of things in life, the second half of Year 12 typically just flies by, so you don’t want to be caught unprepared.
Am I saying you should be smashing thirty practice exams a week between now and exams? No, obviously not – that would be absurd. But I am saying that you can start preparing for exams right now. It doesn’t have to be strenuous. It doesn’t have to be time-consuming. But you can start.
(By the way, please don’t read this and think, “oh-no-I-haven’t-even-thought-about-exam-preparation-I’m-so-behind-ahh-ahh-I’m-going-to-get-a-terrible-study-score!” Because it’s not intended to have that effect. I’ll emphasise here and now that it’s perfectly fine to have not started exam preparation yet.)
Here are some things you can do to get ahead of the pack.
1. Go back to the future
It’s probably not a hugely intuitive time to go back and revise Unit 3. After all, there’s still content to learn – your initial instinct might be to get ahead. That’s all well and good, but you’ll have time to do that in class, and through Term 3.
These upcoming holidays provide a nice opportunity to start revising. If you think about it, you’ll probably revise stuff from the start of Unit 3 at some point – so why not now? Doing so gives you a bit more time up your sleeve later on for other things, like perfecting answer responses.
Again, it doesn’t have to be much. Re-do a few summary questions from the first few chapters. Make cue cards of early definitions, and make sure your responses are on point. Small stuff like that can make a big difference.
2. Make sure your notes are top-notch
Because – trust me – there’s nothing worse than getting to October, opening your notebook, and being like “… this is literally the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
Future You will thank Current You if Current You ensures a decent quality of work. In particular, make sure your notes are ordered logically. Whether handwritten or typed, you can save yourself a lot of time by ordering and labelling certain topics. For maths subjects, this can be doubly good, as you might use that notebook as your bound reference!
(This is also a semi-productive form of procrastination, which is good for those moods where you really want to be productive, but you’re just absolutely spent from refreshing your Facebook feed for four hours straight.)
3. Start timing yourself
It’s good to be able to write an amazing essay, but it’s great to be able to replicate that essay in one hour. Y’know, as you’ll probably have to do for English and/or other subjects.
The more you time yourself now, and put yourself under exam-like pressure, the better you’ll be at it when November comes. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t matter if you stuff it up the first few times. If you try to write an essay in an hour and get through just the introduction, that’s okay; better now than in the actual exam, after all! And it shows you that you need to work on your timing, which is extremely valuable information.
If you don’t do that until later in the year, you’ll ultimately have less time to work on it. Logically, it follows that you’ll be less prepared come exams – and I’m guessing that preparation has a pretty strong correlation with success.
4. Set up a practice exam spreadsheet
I really like this idea. (But I also like spreadsheets in general, so I guess take it with a grain of salt haha.) Hear me out.
You set up an Excel spreadsheet with columns labelled, “Date”, “Exam”, “Mark” and “Notes”. Respectively, you fill in when you completed the exam, which exam it was (for example, “VCAA 2014”), how you did, and whether there were any questions in particular that troubled you.
Doing something like this can really help you track your progress over time. And, with the inclusion of the “Notes” column, it can help to highlight types of questions with which you consistently struggle. That might be a particular topic, but it also might be a particular style of question. Very useful.
5. Ask questions on ATAR Notes!
ATAR Notes has you covered. If you’re unsure about anything you’ve covered this year, ask on the forums! Seriously – you’ll never find a more supportive community. Check it out!
Make sure you’ve liked ATAR Notes on Facebook, and that you’re a part of The VCE Discussion Group!
