How to study for a subject with a new study design?

[abzzzz]

I'm doing IT applications and the study design is new this year. Any tips on how to study for the new design? i really want to do good in it since it scales down by so much

[REBORN]

Psych is a new study design as well. Pretty much I feel obliged to know everything and I'm cherishing the 10 exams I have. That is, I won't start them until 2.5weeks before.

[Lasercookie]

I've pretty much summed up my approach to exam revision for IT Applications in this thread here:
Exam Preparation

I strongly recommend you to go through the entire study design dot-point by dot-point. For each dot point, write everything you know about it. Then go back to vceit.com and the textbook and compare. Add in anything you missed out. This process doesn't take too long, I probably made up my study design notes in about 6 hours total. Once you've done this, you'll have a pretty good understanding of the course.

There aren't enough trial exams to spam them with IT Apps (it wouldn't help much either, you could probably easily do them anyway). Make sure you do every exam you get your hands on properly. This means sitting there for the entire two hours, checking over thoroughly.  Once you're done, mark harshly. If you're answer is not pretty much exactly what they've given in the answers, mark it incorrect. If you miss out on one minor detail, mark it incorrect. If your answer was too long winded, mark it incorrect. The main thing is to get into the habit of writing answers that the examiners will want.

I would be trying to do about 1 exam a week, minimum. I don't think it'd be a good idea to cram all the exams into the two weeks prior to the exam. You really do need to give yourself enough time just obsessing over the exam and your answers.

Also, ensure that you take a look at the previous study design exams from VCAA (2007 to 2010 I think). Ensure you familiarise yourself with how rubbish the IT Applications exams are. Read Mark Kelly's exam post-mortems (vceit.com) and the VCAA assessor reports (Mark Kelly will point out dodgy questions and such). Ensure that you can be given a horribly written question that makes no sense and that will be able to spit out the answer that will get you full marks.

[paulsterio]

Personally you would study as you would study a subject with an old Study Design!
Just because the study design is new doesn't make the subject any different or harder or anything.

Like Laseredd, I would personally go through the Study Design word for word, which is what I did with Software Development last year
With each point in the Study Design I would go to the textbook and find out what it says about that point, and then do some online research

Also, with IT subjects in general (both ITA and SD) you've got to remember that there's only so many questions they can ask you, so essentially there's no point in spamming trial exams (there's no point for any subject, but I can't be bothered arguing with those who believe that spamming trial exams is a substitute for learning maths theory) but what you want to do is basically what Laseredd is suggesting, on the Exam last year I lost marks for fairly stupid things which in retrospect I really did know, but you have to make sure your wording is right, I would personally say avoid paragraphs, and stick to dot points or even just simple sentences, you don't want to sound like a long-wounded book, you want to get to the point and answer the question, if you haven't answered the question, you could write a page and it'd still be wrong!

Also note that the Study Design hasn't changed a great deal so just select questions that are relevant out of the older exam papers! Also, there always are questions that are badly worded, watch out for them!

[aiming_95]

*bump*

Was just wondering when subjects get new study designs, how major are the changes from the previous ones ?

[Hutchoo]

*bump*

Was just wondering when subjects get new study designs, how major are the changes from the previous ones ?

The changes are pretty small, nothing major.

[Lasercookie]

*bump*

Was just wondering when subjects get new study designs, how major are the changes from the previous ones ?

There's usually a summary of changes document released by VCAA.

http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vce/studies/futuresd.html

http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vcaa/correspondence/bulletins/2011/July/2011JULSUPP1.pdf - changes for all the new study designs next year

It'd differ for each subject. For physics (changed in 2009) and IT Applications (changed this year) the differences haven't been that extreme. But I'd imagine some subjects would have some major changes (physics before 2004 was fairly different in structure). Probably not the best examples, but that's what I know.

[kensan]

English Language is starting a new design from next year... we don't even have book lists, they told us to keep the Units 1/2 book..

[aiming_95]

I'll be doing International Studies and National Politics which will be having study design changes.

[lemah.noor]

im doing I.T applications too, and at the front of my text book has a checklist on what i should know for the exam .. so im going by that, its pretty helpful .. if yours has one, get on it!

[Lasercookie]

im doing I.T applications too, and at the front of my text book has a checklist on what i should know for the exam .. so im going by that, its pretty helpful .. if yours has one, get on it!

Off-topic, but if you're talking about the Nelson IT Applications book, and pages 'x' to 'xii', that "checklist" are just the study design dotpoints. More importantly, there has been some minor edits and such to the study design, so those pages are out of date.

The changes are minor (mainly fixing typos etc.), but if you're studying each point in depth, it will affect you. You'll end up trying to learn about "incremental (text)" and "auto string number" data types when nothing like that actually exists.

The document on the VCAA website is always the most up to date one: http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vcaa/vce/studies/infotech/infotechsd2011-2014.pdf

[rebeckab]

English Language is starting a new design from next year... we don't even have book lists, they told us to keep the Units 1/2 book..

And by the sounds of it, the changes are pretty major, the whole of units 3&4 have been switched around and the emphasis is totally different.

[Twenty11]

Put a bit of extra focus on new things in the study design. New things are bound to show up on exams.

[oglow30]

It applications was really really easy this year don't worry not much changed only a few subtopics like cloud computing and the problem solving methodology. i aced every SAC and am expecting a 45+ this year in it. I was able to study using practice exams (provided by our teacher) and all the past exams.

[shinny]

Haven't read all the tips others gave, but I went through year 12 in 2008 where there was a new study design for both English and Chemistry. Both of these subjects had quite significant changes to their structure, particularly English which had an entirely new essay involved. Advice I can give is:
1. Find out the differences early on b/w the old and new course. Teachers are probably your best source for this since they should of taught the old course as well. Just because it's a new course doesn't mean all old resources are irrelevant. Sort through yourself what's relevant and not using this knowledge.
2. Cherish the sample exam and any commercial papers that are released. For the rest of the year, Checkpoints is a fairly decent investment for once given that they'll sort through the relevant questions from the old exams, while writing some of their own.
3. Try and get into contact with examiners somehow. Under a new study design, even teachers aren't the most enlightened as I found out. My English tutor was in contact with several examiners and had a much clearer idea of what was needed to be done. Other possible sources include lectures by examiners and the exam guides found in newspapers.
4. It's tedious, but read through the study design at the start of the year to get an idea, and then read it again before the exam to ensure you've covered everything. Textbooks don't necessarily cover everything in there, so it's a good idea to follow the study design rather than the textbook.
5. Nevertheless, your textbooks are still quite a good guide in terms of the depth of knowledge required in most cases. However, I'd advise sifting through a few textbooks as some will have information that the others don't - especially in a new course when even the publishers aren't too sure about what to put in. Get the other textbooks from the library, or grab the book/CD from a mate from another school who uses another book.