How did you do it?

[Yacoubb]

The other question i think all of us want to know is , do only natural smart people like you receive high atars  ?

No. Absolutely not. I know so many naturally smart people who get LOW atars, and known many people who perservere who score the highest.

[Stick]

Stick , looking at your subjects they seem very "over the top " , with spesh maths and further maths . Im doing all of the subjects your doing except for further maths , i think the question we all want to know is how did manage to keep a robust balance  and to achieve a great study score for each subject ?

The other question i think all of us want to know is , do only natural smart people like you receive high atars  ?

I'm not too sure why everyone regarded my workload as so intense, because it really wasn't that bad. Although, that could also be due to the fact that I didn't know any better than what I had done. Be disciplined and don't make yourself do extra work unnecessarily. This is something I think the whole forum is a bit guilty of. I prided myself on doing what I was asked, but to the highest possible standard. I didn't have time to do anything more.

Also, having come back from the medical interviews for Chancellor's Scholars students, I don't think I will ever fit into the league that the rest of the guys were in. o_o So, to answer your question, no, a high ATAR is really open to everyone.

[Only Cheating Yourself]

No. Absolutely not. I know so many naturally smart people who get LOW atars, and known many people who perservere who score the highest.

how many hours did you devote to your 3-4 subjects this year? a week and daily.

[Yacoubb]

how many hours did you devote to your 3-4 subjects this year? a week and daily.

Out of 6 hours of studying, 5 hours. I used 1 hour to complete year 11 homework that I needed to finish. But if I had a year 11 SAC the next day, I'd dedicate about 3 hours to my 3/4s. Out of 20 hours of studying over the weekend, 20 hours to 3/4s. Again, 2 hours on Sunday if I had a yr 11 SAC on the Monday dedicated to year 11 revision.

[Only Cheating Yourself]

Out of 6 hours of studying, 5 hours. I used 1 hour to complete year 11 homework that I needed to finish. But if I had a year 11 SAC the next day, I'd dedicate about 3 hours to my 3/4s. Out of 20 hours of studying over the weekend, 20 hours to 3/4s. Again, 2 hours on Sunday if I had a yr 11 SAC on the Monday dedicated to year 11 revision.

6 hours of studying a night?

[shadows]

Out of 6 hours of studying, 5 hours. I used 1 hour to complete year 11 homework that I needed to finish. But if I had a year 11 SAC the next day, I'd dedicate about 3 hours to my 3/4s. Out of 20 hours of studying over the weekend, 20 hours to 3/4s. Again, 2 hours on Sunday if I had a yr 11 SAC on the Monday dedicated to year 11 revision.

Wow, you are the hardest worker I know! 6 hours after school o.o?
Let me just ask, is it that you feel the need to study for such long periods of time, is it something you just want to do, something you particular enjoy? I am intrigued

Did you get burnt out over the year? Because I can imagine studying so much can really take its toll.....

[Yacoubb]

Wow, you are the hardest worker I know! 6 hours after school o.o?
Let me just ask, is it that you feel the need to study for such long periods of time, is it something you just want to do, something you particular enjoy? I am intrigued

Did you get burnt out over the year? Because I can imagine studying so much can really take its toll.....

I never forced myself to study; I've always done as much as I personally wanted. To be honest, I never burnt out until I finished my two year 12 subjects' exams. After that, I burnt out & couldn't study for year 11 exams. But that was just me telling myself that all I needed to do was pass the year 11 exams, and not so much worry about getting really high marks for them. I dunno, everyone is different I guess.

[silverpixeli]

Personally I studied a lot at home, but didnt really work a lot at school. The classroom environment wasnt particularly great for me for learning/working, so I spent the time listening to the teacher and helping classmates and also asking the teacher any questions I had at any point. With 6 hours a day passively working/hanging out with friends at lunch/recess, studying 4-5 hours a night after school didn't burn me out. Also, I enjoyed learning and working through content because I found it interesting (e.g most of physics) or challenging (e.g. most of specialist)

[speakerphones]

I actually was quite lazy in classes, didn't do much. At home I studied with music and food a lot LOL and i always had my phone and mac open. But I think for me having all of that around allowed me to become really tolerant to distractions and it also gave me constant breaks/motivation to keep studying throughout the entire day, so I never really took extended breaks. This probably won't work for everyone but it helped me to be able to study through the afternoon and well into the night

AND STAY ON TOP OF EVERYTHING because you won't feel excited to study for a subject you're too far behind in!

[LastOfUs]

I actually was quite lazy in classes, didn't do much. At home I studied with music and food a lot LOL and i always had my phone and mac open. But I think for me having all of that around allowed me to become really tolerant to distractions and it also gave me constant breaks/motivation to keep studying throughout the entire day, so I never really took extended breaks. This probably won't work for everyone but it helped me to be able to study through the afternoon and well into the night

AND STAY ON TOP OF EVERYTHING because you won't feel excited to study for a subject you're too far behind in!

I envy you and your 48 in business. I put in so much time in the last two weeks before the business exam, literally all day everyday for two weeks of studying and I came out with a 38 Did you enjoy it or did you just find it really easy and practice alot? For every SAC, I crammed on the day of it and scores very well, but at exam time I couldn't remember a thing and had to relearn all the content (which I could probably have done in 2-3 days, full consecutive days of study = delusion you're actually studying but in actual fact sitting there doing nothing) and I completed two practice exams, both in an hour an ten minutes when in the real exam I basically ran out of time.

I thought it was so easy though, fml. In all my SACS I literally didn't drop a realistic mark all year, but had several marks deducted just for the sake of realism and not cheating (teacher who got fired was retarded) and the exam was so EASY! I looked and it and was like 'wow, 100%!' Then I started being a spastic, writing like quadripple what I needed to because I was arrogant with time and wanted to perfect my answers for like 2 markers, so I ran out of time. Then I know that indicators of corporate culture question stuffed me up as well as the 'describe a social and ethical resp for op system,' as I thought they were two different things (why would you have two different definitions) despite consciously knowing how to answer it I thought it was a trick, so started identifying ONLY a social and ethical for each element. On any other day ... uhhh.

Don't know how you studied with music with business, was impossible. I'd have to sit there for ten minutes literally shouting a definition out into the streets after spending hours writing notes on a computer to being able to remember it for a minute, writing it down on a piece of paper like 20 times and then having a 25% chance of remembering it a week later. I had a realistic idea of what all these definitions meant but I didn't want to make them up on the spot as I was afraid of ambiguity. I literally woke up at 10AM, studied until might night straight without eating much food nor leaving my room, trying to study and it was torturous. I'm blaming this on my hate for business as I wasn't learning and it just sucked, but if that is any indication for what I am in for next year with my chosen subjects I'll probably sell my liver to some sketchy black marketarian fella and invest that money into bitcoins as a hapy medium for a means of life.

[Special At Specialist]

I didn't do particularly well, at least not compared to anyone on AtarNotes, so I'll just tell you what my main mistakes were:

1) Studying very hard during the summer, acting like a hermit and completing the whole specialist maths course before term 1, then becoming complacent and not doing much work until SWOTVAC.
2) Spending almost my whole SWOTVAC doing tech-free methods/specialist exams. Not only did I neglect my other subjects, but I didn't do as well as I hoped for maths because most of the weighting was on the tech-assist exams and I sucked at using my CAS calculator. I falsely assumed that being good at tech-free exams would automatically make me good at tech-assist exams, and it was easier for me to sit down and do a whole stack of 1 hour exams than a few 2 hour exams.
3) Lazy attitude during year 12. I guess I just lost so much motivation. I stopped going to karate and I didn't work a part-time job because I was worried that this would affect my year 12 results, but by not doing these things, I ended up becoming really lazy. If I had developed a routine and a balance between study/work/exercise, I might have been more successful during the year.
4) Studying inconsistently throughout the year: I would do almost no homework for a month, then one weekend I would study for about 12 hours, then go back to doing no homework.
5) Neglecting literature - assuming that I was above average in year 9 English and I never did any work then, so I could just wing this subject and get around a 30 study score. Unfortunately, winging a VCE subject is a lot harder than winging a year 9 subject.
6) Not going to any lectures or getting a tutor. I was adamant that I knew what I was doing and that there would be nothing I could learn from these lectures that I couldn't learn for free off the internet. Perhaps that was true, but going to lectures would have given me the motivation I needed to study for that subject, and having a tutor would've forced me to study consistently.

They were my mistakes in 2012. It's hard to compare this year to last year because my circumstances were so different. I barely even considered myself a VCE student this year: I was working 40+ hours per week doing labour work in a scrap metal factory and that consumed most of my energy. Also, I knew that my ATAR score was basically locked in stone, so the only thing that mattered to me was getting a 25+ in English, which I got (luckily).

[lzxnl]

People seem to think that studying hard is the only way to go about VCE. Well, it's certainly one way of doing it, if you don't mind lots and lots of stress

Personally, I'm probably not too much help because my circumstances were unusual. In my year 8 summer holidays, I felt bored, so I bought a Methods 1/2 book and started working through that. I was quite surprised when I found everything relatively manageable. As a result, I was able to finish 1/2 by the middle of the year and 3/4 by the end of the year. That was Methods out of the way.

Then, as you can guess, I started spesh. However, having already dabbled a bit in maths in primary school, I chose to skip 1/2 and go straight to 3/4. I was able to finish most of spesh in year 10 by myself, but I needed a bit of reminding of what I was doing in the mechanics section by a physics teacher as this was before I had done any physics. Near the end of year ten, I finished spesh as well. That was two VCE subjects already down for me.

You can thus see why year 11 probably wasn't as stressful for me as it should have been. With Methods and Spesh out of the way, I only had four subjects in year 11: Chinese, Physics, Chemistry and English Language. My science classes were very enjoyable; we both covered the year 11 curriculum and also looked at some interesting advanced material taken from first year university courses. Somehow, by doing all of the assignments every week plus reading ahead, I was comfortably able to get my head around physics and chemistry. For English Language, I tried my best for EVERY SINGLE essay I got and kept repeating to myself the importance of doing well in it, while in Chinese, I wrote countless essays throughout the year, used my time on the way to school and from school as well as any spare time at school I got running through my oral exam material in my mind, and did a lot of trial exams. As you can see, I ended up devoting more attention to English Language and Chinese than I did to my remaining four subjects. But hey, it worked in the end; I got subject awards for all of my 1/2s, a 50 in Methods, a 45 in Chinese and dux of year 11. To put this in context, the only award I had ever received at school before was a physics award in year 10.

Thus brings us to year 12, which was this year. What a fun year. I had five subjects: English Language, Physics, Chemistry, Specialist Maths and UMEP physics. My year 10 physics teacher had asked me to learn essentially half the first year university course by myself, and coming off last year, I had a pretty solid 3/4 and UMEP physics foundation. Add to that the fact that I went to the ASI Chemistry Summer School plus my reading in the holidays, and I knew most of the 3/4 chemistry course before the year began. By seeing everything in the course before class, I made it so much easier for myself to learn the material in class. Thus, chemistry, physics and UMEP physics weren't as much of a hassle. Specialist Maths, I had already completed that in year ten, so I devoted almost no extra time to that subject.
I thus spent nearly ALL of my time on English Language, writing essays, rewriting essays, doing extra analyses, asking the teacher questions...in SWOTVAC, I sent my teacher 4 essays in one day at one stage, and I would often spend Sundays writing two essays. My teacher must have become quite sick of me. I would do essays, scheduled to be handed in after a week, in two days, and I'd get extra essay topics. In the end, I probably amassed around 70 essays and analyses at least. I also did around ten English Language trial exams and had each one marked. Even on the week before the exam, I handed in more work to my teacher, and by then, it was pleasing to note the regularity of the 14/15 scores that I was receiving. And how did I manage to get myself to do all of this work? I scared myself into doing it. I kept picturing a scene where I got 50s for everything but a 30 in English Language, which would majorly affect my ATAR. That was enough to "motivate" me to keep working even when things became very stressful and the times weren't good. I got a 55/75 for my first English Language trial exam and that almost completely shattered any drive I had to keep working, but once again, fear kicked in.
As for the other trial exams, I did a LOT of chemistry exams, did fewer physics exams and did spesh exams whenever I felt bored (not kidding). I only did uni physics exams after VCE exams, but I was probably lucky to get away with that.
As my study scores suggest, my way of prioritising English over my other subjects seemed to be quite helpful. However, it must be noted that the success of my study habits came mostly from earlier work I did and my school's year 11 science program. What can be taken from me is the importance of your English subject; that should come first, regardless.
Also, to a certain degree, fear of failure can be a powerful motivating device. You should probably regulate it so that it doesn't overstress and kill you, but it is a useful thing to have. Without it, there would be no way I'd possibly get a 50 in English Language. Even now, my scores surprise me.

[soNasty]

People seem to think that studying hard is the only way to go about VCE. Well, it's certainly one way of doing it, if you don't mind lots and lots of stress

Personally, I'm probably not too much help because my circumstances were unusual. In my year 8 summer holidays, I felt bored, so I bought a Methods 1/2 book and started working through that. I was quite surprised when I found everything relatively manageable. As a result, I was able to finish 1/2 by the middle of the year and 3/4 by the end of the year. That was Methods out of the way.

Also, to a certain degree, fear of failure can be a powerful motivating device. You should probably regulate it so that it doesn't overstress and kill you, but it is a useful thing to have. Without it, there would be no way I'd possibly get a 50 in English Language. Even now, my scores surprise me.

Coming from someone you've never heard of nor spoke to, you are an amazing student

[drake]

1. Anyway, all you high achievers out there; how did you do it? Like really, how?

first of all, I believe the majority of high achievers (99.90 and 99.95) START EARLY! try to finish as many of the courses (particularly mathematical and science subjects) as soon as possible. this allows you to do heaps and heaps of practice exams and so prepare for the exam even at the start of the year! next, it is about CONSISTENT study, not studying just before SACs or exams. continuous study is crucial! and, i also believe, that really high achievers depend on the subjects they choose. you probably need at least two mark-up subjects (to 55, e.g. specialist maths, LOTE etc.) to score in the high 99s. however, try to also find subjects you enjoy as this, in the long run, is more beneficial!

2. Did you slave your arse off and never see daylight? Did you balance work, leisure and play (if so, how?)

a balance is necessary, particularly because you will be stressed the majority of the time! year 12 was definitely the hardest year of my life, and i constantly tried my best to maintain some sort of balance, whether it was through sport, seeing my friends or other co-curricular activities.

3. Did you do a sport or part time job?

i played sport, but did not have a part-time job. i don't think there is really enough time to have a part-time job if you are aiming for the high 99s!

4. Did you make endless amounts of notes and completed countless practice questions or spend hours each night studying?

i guess i made quite a lot of notes throughout the year, some being pointless but some also being useful. for chinese and english, i memorised completely, so it wasn't really about notes (however, i made quite a lot of notes for english before a created the document that i was to memorise before the exam!) also with those subjects, it is important to do heaps and heaps of practice essays and get them marked! it is crucial to increase vocabulary for LOTE subjects before year 12 and then start writing countless essays during year 12, memorising sentence structures, essay structures, good phrases etc. this was particularly necessary with chinese, as i (a foreigner) was competing against background students and had no chance unless i created a solid essay structure that would impress the examiners! with methods, spesh and chemistry, it is all about learning the theory and applying it to questions. and then hit the practice exams as hard as possible! i probably 200+ methods practice exams and 150+ specialist practice exams! i didn't do too many chemistry though (probably 20+). you will find repetition in some question structures! in regard to hours spent, i don't think you should set a time. i think it is best to be EFFECTIVE! i probably studied from the time i got home (~5-5:30) to sleep (~11), with of course dinner in between and breaks. however, i wasn't that effective, so i needed that much time to study every night! i never ever set myself times (e.g. i did not say, "i am going to study for 1 hour and then have a break"). but if that is the method in which you study, use it!

6. Do you regret anything?

sometimes i don't believe the 99.95 was worth it due to the amount of sacrifice that is necessary to achieve it (social sacrifice, relationship sacrifice etc.). while it is good to work hard and achieve high results, it is better to have a balance in life! it is a stressful year, and because i was studying so hard, i didn't have much time to truly enjoy it and take it all in! but that was a sacrifice i made...maybe it was worth it, but maybe not.

7. If you had to repeat year 12 again, what advice would you give yourself? What would you do differently?

hmmm, tough question! perhaps i would try to enjoy more of the year 12 life - being the head of the school, mentoring younger students etc.

if i didn't say it before, VCE is not necessarily about understanding the content of each subject, but understanding the system. it is rigged! it depends on what subjects you choose, not necessarily how well you do in them! and while you may understand the content, you MUST be meticulous! for example, in maths subjects, it is all about being meticulous and careful, not about how great your mathematical knowledge was. while i didn't have an amazing math mind (particularly in problem solving questions), i was very very meticulous when writing and very careful when checking.

also, as you probably work quite hard, make sure your motivations for working hard are good! it is too easy to be motivated by money, fame, men, women, success, security, pleasing your parents, getting into the course you want etc. try to think beyond yourself and be motivated by the fact that you yourself can make a difference in the world and a difference in the lives of individual people! the world already has too many selfish people!

all the best, i'm sure you will be great!

[Only Cheating Yourself]

what would you do over the holidays for your 3-4 subjects?