Wow, you're THE man! Your results actually spoke to me O.O Honestly, I am more on the side of not taking tutoring but what was your main methods of studying for Chemistry? Like flashcards, practice papers, textbooks? If you could at least highlight some of your main study techniques/methods that allowed you to do extremely well in your HSC, that would be much appreciated.
Yeah, flashcards all the way. I used quizlet for prelim + HSC as the interface is prettier, but now I just use Anki and it's a godsend.
I did a ton of past papers but these were all old syllabus papers because we were the first year to do the new course. I think for the HSC I ended up doing ~ 20 papers? The quantity isn't important. I know people who did way more work and performed worse because they weren't doing the most important thing - learning from your mistakes. Whenever you get a question wrong, or see something new in the rubric,
add it to your notes!!
I used Pearson for Chemistry and it was decent. I learnt all the low yield random facts. I never asked "is this going to be on the exam", if it came up, I learnt it. This is by no means efficient - typically you want to spend time learning the high yield facts and not waste too much time on low yield stuff. But I believe (and still do) that learning some of the low yield information helps cement concepts better in your head.
Always ask questions in class, or if you teacher sucks, find a forum ie. stackexchange or quora, and ask questions there. Or ask your tutor.
Be self-aware of what do you and don't know. You should be able to explain everything you know to someone else - this is called the "Feynman Technique". If you can't explain something to someone, you don't understand it. Whenever you explain something, ask yourself "why". Why does this happen.
For example, weaker students will say "water is a polar molecule" and leave it at that. Ask yourself why? Because it's electronegative. Why does that make it polar? Because this means that electrons from the hydrogens spend more time around the oxygen and less time around the hydrogens. This creates a partial negative charge around the oxygen (more negative charges are spending time there) and a partial postitve charge around the hydrogens (less electrons spending their time there).
So just by asking yourself "why", you just went from a band 3 to a band 6 answer.
Finally, hone your exam technique. Tbh, there is little difference between mid band 5 and mid band 6 in terms of knowledge - the difference is how they apply it. A tutor can help with this, but what I did was I always strived to improve my answer and always referred to the marking schemes when marking my past papers. Whenever there was something I forgot, or something that wasn't necessary, but mentioned in the rubric, I would add it to my notes. I would do this regardless of whether I had gotten the question right or not. I basically ended using past papers as methods of learning new content.
But like, there are a ton of free HSC notes, why is buying notes better than free notes? If I may ask...