This post may be read by a variety of people, maybe those who want to fine tune their processes early in the year or those thinking they might just drop it.
Here's a little about me:
Going into year 11 I was doing specialist and methods, never considered it any other way. Long story short, struggled with my spesh teacher and dropped the class, breaking my fathers heart. Fast forward to the end of year 11: straight A+s lost 3 marks total on all methods SACs, on into year 12 where my predicted study score was over 40...By the time exams came around, I was unprepared and had completely given up. I received a raw 29. You may be reading this going, well I'm not going to take her advice then... which would have been my reaction too, but having received a 90+ atar and achieving high marks in all other subjects I have narrowed down my year into 3 key mistakes that I made throughout year 12, 3 mistakes you might also be making and can easily avoid.
Mistake number 1:
The textbook
Across VCE in my opinion the biggest mistake students make is to use their textbook as THE MANUAL TO SUCCESS. This is not the case.
In many subjects ei. Biology, chemistry, HHD, PE summaries (like atarnotes #shamelessplugging) provide a much better summary of the course work VCAA can test on.
In methods a textbook is extremely important, practice questions and repetition are extremely important.
My class used the Nelson textbook…
For exam prep: highly recommend, uses real exam questions blah blah blah….for class, for working throughout the year DO NOT RECOMMEND.
I personally finished the course work for methods in early May, giving myself almost 6 months to complete practice exams, however I found that there was a gap in my knowledge for some reason, somewhere I’d lost a link connecting the practice problems in my textbook to exam papers, and the more practice papers I did I was starting to realise something just wasn’t clicking.
It was too late in the year when I realised what I really needed was to start over and redo a large part of the course focusing on the basics, basic trig, transformations, discrete probability.
Most people use the Cambridge textbook, if that’s you, then you’re in the right place, for the areas I relearned using the Cambridge textbook I only lost 1 mark, if you’re thinking about using Nelson for revision definitely recommend, however for a base understanding definitely not the way to go.
Mistake number 2
Consistency and Repetition and Repetition and Consistency
While mistake number 1 was partially #RANTING101 what let me down more than the textbook was my approach, throughout VCE I was an extremely inconsistent studier, we’re talking all of unit 4 biology (edrolo videos with notes and then topical summaries) in 1 day. Methods unit 3: 2 months, no homework during the week and finish 1 chapter on the weekend.
So when it came to May, I had completed the textbook and had no motivation to push for that next non existent chapter.
The key to methods is consistency, a couple of nights a week 20-40-60 short problems whatever seems achievable. I had one friend who went home every night, took an hour break, did 15-20 minutes of methods problems and then started his homework for all other subjects EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.
It doesn’t have to be every night it just needs to be consistent, because its not only going to stay in your head but it's also going to ensure you don’t fall behind easily, because the feeling of being behind in a system that ultimately is a competition #controversial #touchysubject well the feeling is kind of depressing and definitely unmotivating.
So try and keep your practice regular, I found it motivating to discuss how much homework we were going to do/what we were going to as homework with my classmates.
Mistake Number 3
Thinking it was too late
This won’t affect most of you now unless you’re considering dropping it because you don’t think it can get better. But if you’re reading this later in the year it might help.
Its never too late to do some more practice, while building up mathematical thinking and skills does take time, there are plenty of things that you can learn in minutes.
By the time September holidays rolled around I had completely lost motivation, I put more effort into my other subjects and swept methods under the rug. Two weeks before my exam I started over on Trig and on normal distributions using Cambridge textbook and turns out those parts of the exam for me were stress free. Back in September if I’d just started tackling one area a week no matter how small, I would have been much much much more prepared for that final exam.
Thanks for reading if you stuck it out. Most of the stories that people read on VCE journeys are success stories, how I went from Ds to Dux or failing chem to raw 45, this was definitely a bit different.
If you have questions for me drop them down below.
And I’ll cheesily end with a quote that sums up my VCE experience having finished and talking to people around me about their achievements and regrets.
“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up” - Thomas Edison
Mod edit: removed all-caps from title
Home
Help
Search
Login
