physcis 11 vs physics 12

[sprout]

what resources do you recommend for 3/4 physics?
Cheers.

I only used checkpoints and it was decent. most questions are repeated many times with slight changes, but imo most physics questions are like that. Once you understand the concept and how to apply it, physics it's pretty straight forward.
Ranked 1 at my school used to do commercial papers, but only the needed section before sacs - obviously worked well for her.

[stockstamp]

What I found with physics this year is that the textbook (Heinemann) seems to teach you from a more conceptual perspective - if you learn exclusively from it (which is what I did) you will be spending more time trying to develop a really strong understanding of the content in physics. Even the textbook questions were often like this.

While this is useful (sort of... not always) it's much more useful to spend your time on practice questions. The exam/SACs are really just a test of how few careless mistakes you can make, and rarely probe into difficult conceptual based questions. I spent most of my time learning 'how things work' at a theoretical level, but very little time putting it into practice. It was only after the last SAC that I realised I had made a mistake in doing this.

My advice is to download the study design, make sure you have a good understanding of each dot point (without being excessive! Just make sure you know what each dot point means and its relevance), do the textbook questions (they consolidate theory reasonably well - I wish I had done more of these) then launch straight into practice questions (checkpoints - many people in my class did every checkpoint question before a SAC - I didn't, wish I had - do this). You won't find it very difficult. All the questions are reasonably similar, and they are rarely properly difficult.

When you get to Light and Matter, might be a good idea to delve deeper into the theory - this can actually make the subject more interesting as well as being useful.

[odeaa]

what resources do you recommend for 3/4 physics?
Cheers.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say don't even bother with the textbook if your school isn't fussed (my school threatened to give me an ns for chem because I barely did half the textbook lol). This also depends on your teacher and how good they are, but if your teacher is reasonable the textbook is barely necessary, I found it to be so filled with shit considering how little content there really is. Instead, really pay attention in class and then go home and watch khan academy and any good quality video you can find on the topic on YouTube (brightstorm is really good, a few others out there). This will give you a solid knowledge base, tbh vce physics is so superficial you really don't need to know everything in a huge amount of depth.

You can take notes if you want, personally I just watched the videos and it seemed to click because it's all basic shit

After this, smash the checkpoints which are the past vcaa exams for each topic and a few others. This will allow you to see what vcaa like to ask (often like 3 questions per topic that they just repeat over and over, dad reckons the questions he was doing in the 70s are like the exact same as nowadays lol)

Then I did the exampro questions, which are good to refine all your knowledge because of the worked solutions. I would then do neap smartstudy which were my personal favourite because they covered every vcaa question type and are a little bit harder.

After doing all this, you should have a pretty good knowledge of the topic, so I would do all the vcaa papers for that topic (they are sorted into topic) back to 1997, avoiding any weird questions from the old study designs. You can get these from your librarian at school who should have a disc with all the exams. This might sound like a lot of work but each section is only like 15 minutes so I would just smash all these out when cramming the night before a sac. After doing all that, you are golden for anything they can throw at you

Tldr: get checkpoints, exampro and neap smartstudy, and do in that order (imo)

[zsteve]

What I found with physics this year is that the textbook (Heinemann) seems to teach you from a more conceptual perspective - if you learn exclusively from it (which is what I did) you will be spending more time trying to develop a really strong understanding of the content in physics. Even the textbook questions were often like this.

The Heinemann textbook did this, but I was more often confused because of the generalisations/jumps in logic/etc. that the book made (especially in topics such as electromagnetism).
In fact, some of the concepts used in VCE physics such as a motional emf in which a long conductor 'sweeping through lines of flux' and hence creating an emf (but no current) aren't conceptualised correctly in the textbook, for the reasons that:
- textbook seems lazy
- more importantly, VCE doesn't provide the mathematical basis for a proper treatment of much of physics.
For motional emf, I ended up writing a lengthy article (on a train ride home ) to convince myself that the formula