Hey no worries, thanks for getting back to me

Yeah, music is a bit of a struggle if i'm being honest because I haven't been taught a proper approach to the questions and so it really just ends up being a lot of guess work. I struggle with melodic dictations heaps but am sort of practicing with a music program to help me - have you got any general strategies for getting at least something down?
I'm doing a performance elective from 1945 - last 25 years (1992) and it hasn't been too bad. But I agree it's such a massive workload. The piece's we're studying are listed below, if you have ANY notes or advice I would really love to hear from you. Trials are just around the corner so hearing from you could literally save me for the exam.
Mandatory topic:
Nigel Westlake - Penguin Ballet
Paul Stanhope - Morning Star III
Brett Dean - Twelve Angry Men
Graham Koehne - High Art
Sarah Hopkins - Reclaiming the Spirit
Additional Topic: 1945 - 1992
John Adams - Short ride in a fast machine
Arnold Schoenberg - A survivor from Warsaw
Thanks again, hoping to hear back soon
Hey man,
Sorry for the super late replies - definitely trying to be a bit more active on the forums, feel free to send me a PM any time!!
In terms of performance, there's not much advice I can give you without seeing you perform it live, literally all I can say is just the generic things of practice, make sure you time it properly so that your repertoire fits within the time but mostly make sure your pieces show off enough technique and diversity of style to all of the marking criteria.
In terms of the Aural exam, this was incredibly challenging - I too felt the pain of melodic dictation; was always the hardest section of the whole paper and we all secretly hated that one kid who had perfect pitch and breezed through these 6 marks. For this part, the best way I found was to firstly notate the rhythm using the first playing and get a sense of the melody then use each subsequent playing to do each new bar. I just focused on it bar by bar, then slowly i could do 2 bars at a time. Realistically the bar gets lost in the whole piece so I would remember two bars and hum that continuously until the excerpt was over then notate it - easier said than done. This required great knowledge of intervals, throughout year 9 and 10 we did interval training a LOT, we had to recognise most of the intervals. If you've never done this, you use songs you know to find the interval, so the start of twinkle twinkle little star is a perfect 5th etc. then when you get more familiar with them you can start to be able to recognise them faster.
Other tips for melodic dictation - look at the excerpt as a whole, cos quite often they repeat sections - if you hear a section repeated then you dont have to waste time figuring out the intervals.
In terms of the other parts of the Aural exam, let me know if you struggle with other bits - the essay was always a killer!! But I can definitely mark any answers you have and answer any questions

B sharp mate!! (lamest pun to end on but was the best I could think of)