Half Yearly Exams

[scyouknow13]

Hi,

How do you study during your half yearly exams period? Like would you go over your notes or do more practice papers? What if you have exams consecutively?

[RuiAce]

For almost every part, studying for a half yearly block is functionally the same to any exam period. You should go over your notes as much as possible (for applicable subjects), and be completing as many past papers as you can possibly do.

The balance between notes and papers is something you should decide for yourself. You will need notes for a lot of subjects, and you will need to ingrain them quite thoroughly. However, you cannot expect to rely purely on the notes and yield results. Past papers force you to think the way you would in an exam. The questions on these papers reflect the style of your exam better than anything else. You should ultimately be shifting your focus to past papers as you go, but it is entirely your call as to when that is.

And then there's maths, where you really should jump into past papers ASAP because notes diminish in usefulness too quickly for it.


They say that half yearly exams are the HARDEST of the lot, the entire year. One of the biggest contributors to this is the increased likelihood of consecutive exams.

You will need to learn to manage your time. You may have situations where there's 2 exams in a day, or 1 exam but on consecutive days. Jamon talks about 2 exams in 1 day and I talk about general situations in the linked threads. Even if they aren't directly targeted towards half-yearly exams, they are still relevant.

[jamonwindeyer]

Hi,

How do you study during your half yearly exams period? Like would you go over your notes or do more practice papers? What if you have exams consecutively?

I'll just throw in to add to Rui's great answer above - Try and front load things that aren't practice exams. What I mean by that is, if you need to get notes written, essays written, quotes memorised, whatever - Get that done first! That way the practice, when it comes, is closer to the exam and so should logically help you more!

Remember to mark your practice papers and address any problem areas with textbook problems, or other further practice. No point doing the papers without learning from the mistakes you make in those papers

Try and alternate the types of study you do, to make it easier on your brain and body. A full day of English essay writing won't be as effective (imo) as doing half English, half Math. It's using different parts of your brain so will hopefully let you invest more energy

And finally, front end the exams that are first. Don't do a heap of study for your Math exam on Friday, only to try and cram over the weekend for your English exam that Monday. You should start studying in the order the exams appear, roughly, to make sure you get a roughly equal amount of study for all of them further, give yourself a break after each exam! I always found it better to recharge for an hour or two after an exam, not run home to study immediately

Just a few tips - Hope they help!

[elysepopplewell]

Identify what your weaknesses are early, whether that be your weaknesses in exam technique or weaknesses in the syllabus. So, if you've got your creative down-pat but your AOS essay is your weak point, then you need to allocate time to the essay, rather than time to the creative. I know that when you are confident with something it's easier to cling to that for the good feels, but before an exam it's definitely worth pushing yourself to work on the parts that might let you down. I know that on paper it seems like common sense, but I know myself and in my peers that we gravitated towards re-studying the parts we were most confident with because it was comforting, and it's blissful to deny that there's daunting stuff you don't know.

If it's in content, go through your subject's syllabus and highlight what you do know really well in one colour, what you could kind of get by with in another colour, and then the stuff you don't really know at all. Start with the stuff you don't really know at all, because you'll be selling yourself short if you're extensively tested on that in the exam but you failed to give it time in your study.

Overall, half yearlies are a really good introduction to studying for an exam block, in my opinion. It's different from Year 11 exams, the intensity is there. You might realise after your exams that however you chose to study wasn't really effective, and that's fine. It's all learning, so you can try something new for trials and get it right for HSC.

Also, dedicate some time to thinking about how you'll approach each exam paper (eg, multiple choice first, which essay second, etc).

Good luck!