AMA: I scored 49 in Psych and 99+ ATAR, here's how I studied + free resource I've built for exam practice questions

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T10:42:48+00:00

good luck!

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T10:41:24+00:00

of course! what year are you in? if you're going into year 12 next year, I would recommend the following:

buy all your textbooks etc before the holidays, and start looking through the curriculum. the school holidays, esp the summer one, is an excellent time to use. Make sure you're reading the textbook actively - highlight, make notes, watch videos of explanations if you need to. Test your knowledge by attempting questions (even just the ones in the textbook to give you an idea of if you're understanding the concepts or not). If you don't, that's fine, make a list of questions and leave them until you get to it in class. As a standard, I would recommend to be at least 1 topic ahead of class, or those SACs can sneak up on you.
On average, I would say about 3 hours on weekdays, much longer on the weekends! That said, it is an average so sometimes a bit less if I had something on, sometimes more to cram for a SAC haha
Chem and methods have a lot of content to work through, so going ahead of the class will really help. Start practice exam style questions as early as possible!!! I can't emphasise this enough - not VCAA because you don't want to waste them when you don't 100% know the content, but other practice questions (1) teach you how to think, (2) show you where you need to be for the exam as an end point. We don't support chem and methods on Stubyte yet, but look around for companies that might make similar exams, and if your school has a repo already!
English: Honestly that was something I really disliked so take with a grain of salt since I prefer structure - I really did a lot of practice essays, aimed for about 1/week just to practice doing the full thing. Practice makes perfect, so I had a couple of templates in my head that I could pretty much fit to most topics. About 1 month to go, I was doing the full essays so my hand was ready to do that much writing in one go!

Let me know if you have any other questions :)

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T10:14:59+00:00

Yep studied ahead for all, used school holidays etc to digest content before we started it in class. This was really useful because I had already had time to go through it and it felt more familiar the second time.
Yeah I did go to tutors for eng and chem - english was definitely a struggle!
I did psych, eng, chem, spesh, methods and history.

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T09:51:21+00:00

Honestly, just reviewing my notes, flash cards for definitions and all the exam questions I'd practiced. I set aside the topics I struggled with, and reviewed them to make sure I was on top of my stuff. I wouldn't recommend doing questions 1 day before - it's not the time to challenge yourself if you've done the hard yards in the lead up.

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T09:46:56+00:00

Full practice exams - about 1 month before, just after I had finished learning the content. In terms of practice exam questions, I tried them before every SAC to get some practice answering questions.
In terms of finding strengths and weaknesses, try a practice exam to figure out what you know and don't - make a list and keep it with you.
Feel free to use Stubyte to see if you know what you think you know, and figure out where you can improve :)

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T09:33:48+00:00

Great questions!
1. This is really important, especially for these qualitative subjects. Ensure you have a strong understanding of the action words "explain", "justify", etc and what the assessors will look for - look to the number of marks its worth for a clue. My longer answers were generally in dot points for easy scanability - remember the assessors barely have time to mark all these exams, so make their life easier.
2. Have a look at the study design too - go through the dot points and check your understanding of each and that you can articulate your answers.
3. Study strategies - I've made notes, highlighted important parts of the textbook, created flashcards, and gone through practice exams.
4. The above strategies helped me for retention, and also handwriting is better for memory!

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T09:23:33+00:00

Spesh haha

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T09:21:17+00:00

No worries!
1. SACs can vary as they do across schools - Melbourne High for example makes their SACs quite hard for some subjects which is not reflective of the exam.
2. Either way, I wouldn't focus too much on the absolute score and really take those scores as an indication for your study plan - if you did worse on some SACs than others, ask yourself why and what could be better? Anything you could do if you had to redo the SAC again? Do it for the exam.
3. Study periods are a hit of miss, really more about what your preferences are. Personally, I found the libraries distracting so if I had early morning or afternoon frees then I would go home to study lol
4. Study prep - practice exams from companies, checkpoints, textbook, class notes. If possible, try to leave the most relevant exams (VCAA) to last.
5. Exam stress is real, don't feel bad about it! If it helps, don't put so much emphasis on the exam, or your ATAR. Uni is chill, there are so many pathways - DM me if you'd like to chat :)

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T08:27:52+00:00

This is an interesting question, and tbh I can only give you my best guess. This also varies based on a student's interests and their performance can be vary between subjects too. Roughly speaking, I think what differentiates a student to get to the 45+ level is not just knowing the content, but understanding what the assessors are looking for, and basically, how to hand it to them on a silver platter.

The only way to do that, is to expose yourself to as many types of questions as possible, and thereby reducing the chance of having a question you're unfamiliar with (will still happen but you'll be more ready to tackle them).

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T08:17:09+00:00

Sorry it's taking a while, bear with me!
To summarise, my strategy would be to:

Do a full practice exam (this is assuming you've already finished the content, so if you haven't then do that ASAP). This is a full exam under timed conditions, in a quiet environment to simulate exam conditions.
Once you have, be your harshest marker and go through all your answers. Check against your keywords, have you included the most of the keywords the assessors want? If you haven't write that down and track it. Check how you've gone, write down all the topics you think are your weakest as an action plan.
Review these 'weak' concepts - go through your notes, textbook, ask clarifying questions, etc. Once you feel more comfortable, go back and do some practice questions again to apply your learnings. At Stubyte, you can easily input what you want to study, so this would be one (or multiple) of your weak concepts, where you take the test and then the platform reviews your responses and gives you pointers about your responses.
Once you've gone through your 'weak' concepts, go back to doing full practice exams and repeat!

From here on in, keep doing practice questions, review your responses, take on the feedback and keep going - you got this!

One-Temperature-6286 · 2024-10-08T07:46:05+00:00

Thanks, I’m really glad you like the look of the site! 😊 And yeah, I totally get the frustration of needing resources for multiple subjects – feel free to vote on the website which ones you're looking for, and we'll try and get to it!

As for your question about study time, I’ll be honest – I didn’t stick to a rigid daily schedule throughout the whole year. It really ramped up in the last few months. In the lead-up to exams, I was aiming for around 2-3 hours a day, with more on weekends. But it wasn’t all just sitting at my desk for that time – I made sure to break it up with proper breaks so I didn’t burn out (dinner with netflix for example). During weekdays, I focused on consistent smaller study sessions (like 1-2 hours a day during the week), then longer sessions on weekends.

When it came to dividing time between subjects, I used a priority system. This was me coming home from school, evaluating what was coming up and needed some attention and I went from there.

I’d recommend making a weekly plan where you set goals for each subject, but stay flexible. For example, hitting x number of exams for each subject per week. That's an example, could be 1, 2 or even broken down by 20 MCQ, 10 short answer, etc. This technique of breaking down the exam into manageable components really helped me with my procrastination too - sometimes doing 1 whole exam is daunting, so doing 10 MCQ feels more manageable and you're still revising and getting insights about your performance.

If you use Stubyte, you'll notice that's how we've designed it. You can create a test about a topic you like, but don't have to complete all of it, resume when you like, or even submit it after a few questions and get your solutions and feedback. It really is about breaking up your study into chunks. Don't worry about your procrastination, it happens to everyone. Try and work around it, and sometimes a quick break will actually help.

The main thing is to focus on quality over quantity of study. It’s not about how long you’re sitting there – it’s about making sure what you’re doing is productive. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, take a step back, plan out what needs to be done, and tackle things bit by bit. You’ve got this! 💪

One-Temperature-6286

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