Practice Exam Organisation

[jane1234]

1) Is there a set order you do exams? VCAA first? By year? Certain companies?

1 or 2 VCAA first, then companies by whatever I click on first, then the remaining VCAA.

2) How do you organise your "Exams to do" as well as "Completed Exams"? More specifically, where do you put the completed exams afterwards?

Print exams out as I do them, then put them in a massive folder after I've completed them.

3) Do you use b^3's practice exam tracker? If so, what do you think of it (in terms of preparation effectiveness) on a personal level?

Nah, don't really care about my stats, I just want to be consistently in a certain range for each subject.

4) Do you use some sort of logbook for mistakes?

Kind of. I don't write a list of EVERY mistake, just list the main areas I need to study/common silly mistakes.

5) What do you think of completing a trial exam more than once?

Nah, despite what everyone says I do remember the answers so I find it kind of pointless.

[b^3]

One thing that has changed over the past month or so is that I've started using b^3's exam tracker spreadsheet now, and it is pretty good at keeping track of things! One weird thing that happened though was that the score for my 5th Methods Exam 1 is that it shows my score as '0' (zero) on the stats graph, which is puzzling and makes me look kinda bad

Do you want me to take a look at the problem Vincezor? If so attach the file here or in the stickyed post and I'll see what I can do.

[Lasercookie]

2) How do you organise your "Exams to do" as well as "Completed Exams"? More specifically, where do you put the completed exams afterwards?
All my exams are PDF. I have them up on my computer screen and then I write the answers in an exercise book. This saves money and the environment since I don't have to print off loads of paper. It also lets me navigate a lot quicker and is much more convenient.

The only thing I can think of is to get the "exam conditions" feel and get used to the amount of space available for working. Now I feel that this reason isn't that good - exam conditions is better replicated by enforcing a strict timeline on yourself. The amount of space thing isn't that important. It would better to try and keep your answers to about 1 line per mark.

Yeh I always have trouble fitting my "working" in the space provided (I seem to show alot for some reason, maybe because I'm afraid of losing marks) so that is why I print them off and as mentioned above to get the 'feel' of the exam and the conditions. Does everyone else do the practice exams under exam conditions i.e. time limit, no communicating, no phones e.t.c?

I do think that the pdf screen idea is a good one though.

Well after doing the pdf screen thing for a bit, I found two disadvantages:

It's harder to flick back and forth between questions/area of studies on most trial exams, mainly because most of them are poorly made PDF files without bookmarks and such.

You can't scribble notes and circle/underline stuff in the question statement. I find scribbling and underlining helps me to not forget to take into account that the scale says milliseconds and not seconds.

I'll still continue using the PDF's for most exams, but I've switched to doing VCAA papers on paper. The system I'm using for printing is to set the printer on 'quick print' and print one exam (e.g. VCAA 2009) on one side of the paper. Once that exam is printed, I flip the pages over and print another exam (e.g VCAA 2010) on the other side. This means that I end up using less paper and I don't need to stand there flipping the pages. The only disadvantage to using quick print is that the printer is more likely to jam, so the paper has to be creasefree etc.