Here's my advice.
- Do a year 12 subject in year 11. Even if you go shit at least you'll get some handy points. You don't necessarily have to do the year 11 subject before hand.
- Try to stick to your top 4 subjects. For me I stuck to my top 3 cause I did shit all in Chemistry and English Language (not a good idea, but I got away with it).
- Questions, questions, questions. But read the content first. Don't do the questions then try to learn it.
- Past papers (checkpoints) really help a lot. Check the answers after every paper or set amount of question and make sure you then know how to do them.
- Get an A5 book for every subject and write down all the questions you got wrong.
- Writing up cheat sheets (they actually help you learn, even if you don't use them). Not quite the same as a summary book because this forces you to write it all on two pages, not 20 pages in which no one could remember.
- Go to the public library to do work (after 13 years of school I only found out in the last term of year 12 that going to the library is the best option to do work)
- Put formulas into your calculator.
- In particular for Physics and Chemistry, subbing constants into the calculator as letters.
- When you're test is over a couple of days, with 5-10 minutes to go, go through the whole SAC (reading over it) and memorise which questions their are. If you can, put them on your calculator. That way you can answer them at home.
- If you have time, write down all your answers you've done for the first day and check with your friends what they had, or hear over what the smart people did. Trust me, everyone likes telling each other what they did.
- When you have tests that go over a certain amount of days, check the internet if some of the questions are on the test. (This actually happened in methods, couldn't believe it was there on the net, put answers on the calculator got 100% for the SAC). Also check your textbook as they're might be some of the questions on the test.
- When you're allowed to use your cheat sheet. Make sure it's detailed as possible, having everything there is to know on it. You might think it's hard to do on an A4 size but all you have to do is downsize the size of the page to the size of your hand and then glue it on piece by piece. You can fit about 12 pages on there. I put down the formulas, every page from the textbook and questions that i got wrong that have the right answers.
- Cramming can help. It worked for me. You don't have to do it on the last day before the sac (this was the case most of the time, hahaha) Just one day really cram one subject in.
- When you get to school, do some work before you start class. You'd be amazed how much you get done. Even work at recess or lunch. I usually worked at recess cause it was only 20 minutes so there was no point playing downball or whatever.
- Staying back after school for an hour is good to. It's so much better doing only 2 hours at night rather than doing 3 hours at night.
- Be prepared to work till 3am in the morning some days. The perfect student obviously shouldn't need to. It happened to me all the time, it's going to happen. Just work through it. If you don't like staying up, wake up at 4:30am. Believe me I did this too.
- Doing other subject work in a particular subject was something I did regularly, especially in chemistry and english language. Obviously sit at the back when you're doing this.
- Ask the teacher all the time what's going to be on the SAC. Write it down, don't try to remember what they said.
- Try to use your study periods, don't worry if you don't get much done cause i hardly did.
- Reading your textbook on the way to school before a SAC. Most people do this, but some that don't they think they know all of it, then they realise they were wrong on some things.
That's all I got, I'll write more if i can think of some others.
