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March 29, 2024, 11:42:21 pm

Author Topic: SDD Skills - Exam Preparation  (Read 3172 times)  Share 

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Justin_L

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SDD Skills - Exam Preparation
« on: June 30, 2021, 10:05:02 pm »
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SDD Skills - HSC Exam Preparation

Welcome to the fifth and final article of the Software Skills Series – Exam Preparation! Perhaps you’re nearing the end of your HSC Software journey, or perhaps you’re just starting. This article will aim to provide a short overview of some tips and tricks to get you started on how to best prepare for your final exams.

Content
Hopefully by now, you’ve got a solid set of notes and a good handle of the course content. One good tactic when reviewing is to restructure your notes into questions themselves – then practice writing an answer! This will help to build your muscle memory and get into more of an exam mindset. Remember that there is only a finite amount of questions they can ask based on the content itself, do focus on developing an intuition for what things mean and where they can be applied. Systematically go through your syllabus, and note down any areas you’re weak in, review, and repeat!

Study
There are lots of other good resources on general study skills, but for software specifically, group study can work wonders. Particularly for more subjective areas such as algorithms and system modelling tools, there can be multiple ways to approach a problem, all of which are equally valid! Getting together with your classmates and comparing answers can be a great way to see multiple problem solving and allow you to bounce ideas off each other. Furthermore, having someone else review your work is a great way to improve the clarity of your answers. While you may understand that recursive subroutine that saves you two lines, it may actually be hurting the readability of your answer and costing your marks if the marker doesn’t. At this point in the year, you should be working together with your cohort to bring each other up, and group study is a great way to do it, particular if you have a small class!

Past Papers
Despite everything I’ve said above, you’ve probably already worked out the optimal way to prepare for an exam – by doing it. While the two methods above are great for building up and consolidating your knowledge, past papers in exam conditions are the only way to actually simulate what it’s like to be in an exam room. While everyone studies and approaches things in a different way, I would advice you redo and review all of your trial and class papers, then have a go at some past HSC ones. Depending on how confident you are, you may choose to do them untimed and open book, but you should gradually aim to move towards full exam conditions. All of the usual advice about time management and exam technique applies – aim to use this as a gauge of what question types take you the longest, what topics you stumble the most, then use these to guide your revision. This allows you to use past papers both as practice and revision as you work through and simultaneously review the content areas that you have trouble with.

Hopefully this article had some helpful tips. Everyone learns and studies differently, so do what works best for you! If you have any further questions, feel free to post them in the Software Questions Thread or check out the main thread of our SDD Skills Series. If you have any requests for future articles, please feel free to make a thread. And last but definitely not least, good luck for your exams from all of us at ATARNotes!
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