I just completed my trials, it was extremely exhausting, especially the 3 hour exams. :<
For business studies, what sort of questions did you memorise your essay for?
Oh for that I didn't memorise any essays. Just basically had notes on each dot point and I memorised that and tried to put an example with those from a real company so if it did come up in essay I had a case study
Woah 3 exams?? But why?
This is kinda what I'm planning to do by having the notes done beforehand addressing each syllabus dot point for the subjects that need it and mostly focusing on doing practice questions to prepare. The only downside to this plan is that it will take a lot of time and effort, do you remember how long you studied per day during this period(s for you)?
First set of trials was around term 2 week 6ish, 2nd one was term 3 week 2, 3rd one was term 3 week 7. So yeah pretty full on, however, my school did go really fast through the content. Most subjects the teachers finished content like week 4 in term 2.
My school does this too and the reason is it's to simulate the HSC and make sure the assessment ranks for everyone is properly done because it reflects what you're probably going to get in HSC. This ensures the assessment ranking is fair and nobody ends up dragging everyone down because they performed well in 1-2 hr exams and then choked the final 3 hour one.
During that time as sad as it sounds lol I was probably studying all day. Don't think I had many breaks aside from when I got home ate, then dinner and maybe 1 hr here and there on Facebook, Skype etc. But that was partly due to me wanting such a high ATAR and at the time I had all 1st places aside from ext math, so I was scared to lose the ranks so I didn't take any chances. I think though a healthy amount if you are not like aiming for 99 ATAR would be to aim to do half a paper a day on weekdays if you don't have much hw, then on weekends try do like 1-2 a day.
just wondering how much papers did you do on weekends and weekdays when aiming for that 99 ATAR?
At the start of Year 12 not any cause you don't know enough content to do the papers. During that time I was just making notes and doing practice questions from content being learnt by using stuff from the tutoring I went to. So naturally over time by doing all those exam style questions, when it came to doing the full past papers, I had already come across most types of exam questions. I made sure I was consistently doing that hw. Later on leading up to trials and HSC, it would be 1 paper a day on weekdays if I didn't have hw (but sometimes my school hw was to do some parts of an exam paper). Weekends didn't have much tutoring cause I just went to intensive holiday programs so I only had about 2.5 hours on tutoring for math/English each week. So I had a lot of time to do maybe like 2-3 papers a day. Keep in mind though that I didn't always write my answers in chem and physics, so sometimes I would do the question in my head for written short answer and then compare what I would write vs the marking criteria. Pretty fast way to get through more papers but only something you should do after you have confidence in keeping to a time limit that includes writing.
boredofstudies.org
I haven't really looked too much into the new physics syllabus to be honest. I did physics in 2016 when it was the old syllabus, and I've heard of there now being like 8 and 9 markers which we didn't have in the past. Most of our long responses were on society and environment kind of things or history style questions, where you could just memorise a prepared answer or points to discuss.
do you reckon getting through the content so fast was good?
It probably depends on the student and how fast they can learn. I have always been able to learn things quickly so the fast speed was good for me as I got more time to practice later. However, I can also see how it can be overwhelming in terms of having to learn things quickly, so maybe some students didn't like it. It is good in the sense that you can do a trial exam with all topics in it, as I know from tutoring over a few years that sometimes schools don't put the last module in their trials. I wonder if that results in a poorer performance in terms of the HSC for that last module as students don't have much practice or understanding of types of questions from that module