Hope everyone is enjoying the start of your "holiday"! There is not long to go until the final Methods exams for 2021! And if you’re reading this, you are hopefully close to finishing content, and are planning to start the practice exams soon. However, depending on which company papers you can get your hands on, you can often be faced with an overwhelming number of choices at this time of the year. This is also usually the time where people ask for exam difficulty / quality ratings, so I thought I'd cover it all in this guide.
Quick disclaimer, these are from my personal experience (almost 80 practice exams from 15 different companies), and the difficulty of exams fluctuate year after year. This may not be perfectly accurate, but I have checked the general rating with my teacher and other students, so this should give you a generally good idea!
Gold tier: VCAA & NHT Exams
As these are the official exams produced by VCAA themselves, they are the closest to the style you will see at the end of year exam. If you don’t have time to do many practice exams, or go to a school that does not buy company papers, you can still perform amazingly by doing these ~ 20 exams at your disposal.
Some people prefer to “save” these exams for the two weeks or so before your actual exam. However, I recommend starting with these exams (preferably from earlier years), to really get a feel for what VCAA exams are like. For the final “sprint” before your exam, you should leave some of the more recent ones till the end to fully replicate exam conditions.
Just a quick note that, although the Northern Hemisphere Timetable (NHT) exams are also published by VCAA, they tend to be slightly harder than the ones that we do. Keep this in mind and don’t be discouraged!
You can find these exams for free on the official VCAA website
Great: MAV, Insight, Heffernan
Exams from these companies are second only to VCAA themselves. The quality is very high, and you will hardly ever find typos and mistakes.
The MAV ones are noticeably more difficult than the VCAA standard, and have a lot of very creative “separator” questions ideal for those of you going for a 45+ study score.
Heffernan exams are on the easier side, but in terms of quality, they are definitely among the best.
The Insight exams vary tremendously in terms of difficulty, but are still all high quality and replicate VCAA style to an impressive degree. And, their marking guide is absolutely amazing, you can learn lots of cool tips there.
However, if you want a breath of fresh air, you can check out
this exam written by Larry (a 50er) and I. The questions are all original and follow closely to the VCAA style; the solutions contain far more than simply suggested workings and a marking scheme, providing insights and tips only high achievers can bring. Obviously biased, but I'm also going to include it in this category
Average: NEAP, Kilbaha, Chemology, TSFX
These exams aren’t bad by any means, but nowhere near the tiers above.
NEAP exams are slightly on the easier side. They are quite repetitive, and lack the creativity and separator questions always on the VCAA exams.
Kilbaha, TSFX and Chemology exams are the exact opposite. They’re way more difficult to do, especially under timed conditions. However, this is more due to the fact that there are ridiculous amounts of algebraic manipulation and frightful numbers, instead of the questions themselves being conceptually difficult.
Avoid: TSSM, ACED, QATs, ITute, Austin, LegaC, Engage
These exams are onlt if you’re looking for some time to kill. For example, if you have a penchant for proof-reading, your services might be perfect for some of these exam papers. Another bonus, of course, is that these exams test you on things that you may have never even seen in the Methods course before. That’s right, they go above and beyond the Study Design – what a bargain! Suffice to say, I recommend other hobbies that are more worthy of your time
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