- Notes
- Revision
- Practice!
For notes, a simple yet effective habit I adopted was summarising what was learnt in one day's lesson in a little notebook everytime I returned home. For example, I learn about differentiation one day. I would go home and just jot down in 10 minutes, the equations I learnt in class, the tricky/ hard/ special cases my teacher pointed out and maybe 1 example question in the notebook. Basically having that lesson covered in terms of content. By the time I got to my first task assessment, all my notes were written out in this awesome book which I then published into my finalised notes (my finalised notes included more stuff from tutoring or the textbook I used). I found this really helped me understand the core principles in math (I did this for 4 unit too!).
Revision comes from doing the set homework, focusing in class and generally just finding answers to any questions I had. Math is awesome because there's always so many new questions and methods of doing things you're not used to seeing. So new methods that I learnt would also go into my notes! It's good to have a strong artillery of mathematical methods to doing problems (Especially 4 unit).
Practice! So now that you've gotten the revision, the notes and the understanding, all you have to do now is practice on many many many past papers! For school assessments, try and do your schools' papers (schools tend to be quite lazy and sometimes copy past questions from their own papers) or other papers. HSC papers are also good to try for school exams. I remember during my trial to HSC period, I did all the HSC papers and a number of James Ruse and Baulkham Hills papers because I found that in the other trial papers, questions seemed to be recycled. So if you're looking for challenges, go to the "harder" school papers (e.g. Ruse, Baulkham, Sydney Boys, Sydney Girls, North Sydney boys, Sydney Grammar (very hard)).
Also! As the deadline approaches your assessment date, I would do practice papers under exam conditions to simulate exactly what the real exam will be. It's almost like when sprinters in the Olympics practise as if it is the real deal. Then on the day, they're ready to smash it. Aim to finish practice papers with enough time to check. Then when you mark your answers at home, be wary of new methods and what sample answers say.
(this isn't my original post, it was someone else's)
As for past papers in physics and chemistry, well I guess you gotta just practice with what you have
And for business studies and legal studies I suppose it's just memorising the crap out of stuff and this can be done through making "worksheets" where you have your notes down (with some words cut out here and there) and then printing it again and again and filling the words in 5 times a day for a whole fortnight until you are so bored of it and by then you should be able to memorise stuff
As for the essay subjects which require extended responses, just write the responses and get feedback from a teacher (or look at the marking criteria)
