I received a 99+ ATAR and a perfect GPA - ask me anything.

[Joseph41]

Thanks all for the questions!

What was your biggest VCE regret?

Hmm, tough one.

I guess I regret my subject selection a little bit, although I'm not sure "regret" is the right word as such. In hindsight, I probably would have pursued different avenues, but I'm happy with how things turned out overall. For context, I did:

Year 11: Business Management
Year 12: English Language, HHD, Psychology, Visual Communication Design, Further Maths

It changes all the time, but if I could change it now with what I currently know, I'd probably do something like:

Year 10: Further Maths
Year 11: HHD, Psychology
Year 12: English Language, English, VCD, Biology, Methods

But then, I probably wasn't ready for a 3&4 subject in Year 10, or two in Year 11. Everything seems a lot easier now than it did at the time, so it's simple for me to now say, "yeah, I wish I did these eight subjects!", but I'm not sure how that would have turned out in all honesty.

Otherwise, my biggest regret would be not stepping back a little and seeking help when I needed it. Not so much academically - through Year 12, I became quite good at just saying, "I don't understand that; can you please explain it in a different way?". More for just general life stuff. I struggled a fair bit when Year 12 finished because I didn't know what to do, or how I was "meant" to be feeling. I explained it one time as being super wound up, like a spring, and then suddenly having time to unravel.

I have no regrets about how I prepared through the year, or how I prepared for exams. I did what I could at the particular time, although that's not to say that what I did was perfect pedagogically or anything like that.[/quote]

Also, how did you deal with stress?

By doing things I enjoyed! Very often (mostly weekend mornings), I went off to a cafe for hours at a time to write poetry. I never studied at night, and instead watched sport or just chilled out. I enjoyed casual design. I wasn't playing cricket at the time due to body issues; assuming no injuries, I would have continued with that, too (although would have invested less time into it).

I think the whole not studying at night thing really helped me, though. Instead, I got to school a little early, and stayed a little late, and just did as much as I could at school. It meant I could focus on other things once I got home, like relaxing or tutoring ($).

youre basically a god in these forums. however, how did you find out about an?? (the master was once a student)

Haha, I certainly wouldn't say that, and I certainly don't want that to be the case!

I first heard about ATAR Notes in Year 11 (2011) through one of my Psychology 1&2 classes. My teacher recommended it as a place to get work checked and stuff, which is a bit funny in hindsight. She's had an account since 2009, but has never posted. I lurked for a while, but didn't pay the forums heaps of attention until the exam period at the end of the year. When I finished my Business Management 3&4 exam, I stumbled upon exam discussion, and then messaged a friend with something along the lines of, "shit, I've just found what would have been the BEST resource for BusMan throughout the year". She responded with, "I don't want to know." Haha.

I didn't make my first post until June 2012 - so a fair way through Year 12. I posted here and there, but didn't really become an entrenched part of things until uni, which I guess is a little unusual.

When I first joined ATAR Notes, it was a bit different. In general, there was more emphasis on getting really high scores, and less on other things. As you know, that's a really shallow view of Year 12 and school in general, and I'm so stoked that as a community we've moved away from that. I'm a bit surprised I didn't really start posting on AN until Year 12, given I've posted on other forums since the age of nine haha, but things have turned out nicely enough.

P.S. I'm just some guy that started contributing to the forums and then (really) fell in love with the community. 💙

Hey Nick,
I know VCE was a while ago for you but do you remember what kind of marks you were receiving throughout the year

Vaguely. Never kept track properly (definitely had a good idea at the time, just never wrote scores down anywhere). Scores in general were good, but the numbers specifically aren't that relevant, even if I could remember them to the decimal place (would be more than happy to share - it's just that me saying "75%!" or "98%!" doesn't mean much without further context).

and did you got to an underrepresented school or not?

Wouldn't call it underrepresented by any means. Wouldn't call it outstanding. It was basically dead average (not in a bad way - in a statistical one).

The school these days would usually be somewhere in the 100-200 mark in terms of rankings, I'd imagine. Average study score usually hovers around 31.

[Joseph41]

Now that we're a little way into the new year, a reminder that this thread is open still. If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them as best I can!

[ArtyDreams]

What do you miss the most about school - do you miss anything at all? How did you find the transition from school to uni?

[Joseph41]

What do you miss the most about school - do you miss anything at all? How did you find the transition from school to uni?

Interesting questions!

What do you miss the most about school - do you miss anything at all?
It's been a few years for me now, so I think I've sort of gone through a couple of phases with this.

Initially, I missed the structure - and quite a lot. This relates into my answer for the next question, but I lacked structure after high school, and I was really just craving some sort of routine. I didn't have many contact hours at uni, and I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands to use as I saw fit, and I didn't deal particularly well with that.

Later, once I settled into my new routine, I missed some of the people - and still miss some of the people. It's a very different thing working as opposed to studying, and naturally you have different focuses and goals. It's now been more than seven years since I finished high school, and I find myself reminiscing increasingly about good classes, or teachers I got along with, or just the dynamic of the whole thing.

I think I'm looking back on school more favourably than I probably should, though, because I really struggled at times through high school. The bits I'm remembering, though, are all quite positive, so whilst I definitely wouldn't go back if I had the chance to do it all again, I guess it's some of the people I miss most. I haven't seen some of those friends-but-not-super-close type of people since the end of Year 12 - the ones you see in classes and stuff but wouldn't necessarily find time to hang out with outside of school.

How did you find the transition from school to uni?
Hard. Really hard, in fact. I was extremely close to dropping out in my first semester.

As mentioned above, I didn't deal super well with the lack of routine and the change of environment. I'd become pretty comfortable with how school worked and where I sat in that dynamic. Uni was a different ball game.

Not an inherently more difficult ball game, either - I know a lot of people who found uni amazing right off the bat - but I found it hard personally. I'm really glad I stuck with it, though, as I really quite enjoyed uni by the end of it. I found that the more involved I became with uni life, the more I enjoyed it.

Thanks for your questions.

[lockandchase]

Hello,
I want to ask if you did Methods back in year 12. If you did, what were the study tricks that you used to help you achieve a high study score? I bought VCE checkpoints to do as well as the ATAR NOTES methods book study guide, notes and workbook. I do all my exercises from school, revise and do my notes. But when it comes to test day or sac time, i always end up stuffing up. Which is really frustrating, I always end up getting 63% or less. I've been getting 63% for the past 2 years. Do you also know where to get hard worded questions for methods? Because I just did my SAC 1 for methods at school, and it is so, so hard. Completely different from all the questions i've seen, i've never been exposed to it before, which i think also contributes to me not doing as well.

[Bhrugu]

What were your study techniques? What study methods do you use to remember things most effectively?

[Joseph41]

Hello,
I want to ask if you did Methods back in year 12. If you did, what were the study tricks that you used to help you achieve a high study score? I bought VCE checkpoints to do as well as the ATAR NOTES methods book study guide, notes and workbook. I do all my exercises from school, revise and do my notes. But when it comes to test day or sac time, i always end up stuffing up. Which is really frustrating, I always end up getting 63% or less. I've been getting 63% for the past 2 years. Do you also know where to get hard worded questions for methods? Because I just did my SAC 1 for methods at school, and it is so, so hard. Completely different from all the questions i've seen, i've never been exposed to it before, which i think also contributes to me not doing as well.

Hey lockandcheese! Welcome to ATAR Notes - thanks for your question.

I did Method 1&2 in Year 11, but then dropped it before reaching Year 12 (switched to Further 3&4 instead - I ebb and flow between regretting this and being pleased with the decision).

That does sound frustrating! I don't have Methods 3&4-specific advice to share, but more generally (across all subjects), I think it's important to understand why you're losing the marks you are throughout the year. For example, if you're losing marks in Methods because you're misreading the questions in exam situations, that's a different situation to losing marks in Methods because you don't know the content or formulae, or how to approach questions.

Along this line, my advice is probably to look through previous SACs and work out why you're losing your marks. If it's a matter of understanding the question but being confused about how to approach it, or how to show the most complete working etc., then I'd probably go and re-sit those same SACs (in your own time). This obviously won't charge the marks you received, but my rationale is that you'll actually learn from your mistakes. You could even do them open book - work out how to best approach each question, then sit down and actually do those questions again to the best of your ability. I'm not sure what the dynamic is with your teacher, but they may even be happy to look over it for you and provide additional feedback.

I did this sort of thing with some of my subjects, particularly when I was frustrated about losing marks. Re-doing the questions in this way, to me, is part of what people talk about when they say to "study smart, not hard". It's all well and good doing a SAC and being disappointed with the mark, but if you don't then learn from the test and work out where you went wrong, it's ultimately not leading to much long-term gain.

If, on the other hand, you work out that the marks you're losing are more due to general examination performance (so performing under exam situations), then you can re-create these to practise. Set yourself specific time limits for questions and see how you go. It doesn't matter if you get the question wrong at first or don't award yourself full marks - you can always do it again until you're satisfied with the result. Exam settings are difficult to fully replicate, and they always will be, but you can at least simulate parts of the experience.

As for the difficult worded questions, I'm not 100% sure as I didn't study the 3&4 version of the subject - but you can always ask on the VCE Methods section of this forum, where you're more likely to get a helpful response.

Good luck - let us know how you go!

[Joseph41]

What were your study techniques? What study methods do you use to remember things most effectively?

Hey Bhrugu! How's it going?

In all likelihood, I've probably answered something similar in this thread previously, but given it's been a little while since this thread was last active, I'll answer now without looking back - the responses might even be a little different!

I think, for me, study techniques depended somewhat on the subject at hand. For maths, I just tried to smash out as many practice questions as I could, really - but, as with my response above, I think it's important to understand where you're going wrong, and to keep track of this throughout the year.

I didn't study "mainstream" English; I studied English Language, meaning I didn't really have to read any books or novels. Instead, I tried to apply the subject to every-day life as much as I could, which I think is really useful for the subject. Otherwise, I tried to work a lot with my teacher for this subject on things like essay structure, as I wasn't super confident going into the year. I'm happy to elaborate on this if you or anybody else is interested in VCE English Language stuff!

For VCD, which is a folio subject for the most part, I just tried to plug away at getting my folio done consistently without too many big gaps. I figured keeping momentum throughout the year was important for a creative project, and I can definitely imagine it would be easy for folios to get quite overwhelming if you leave them to one side for too long. I wrote some folio tips a little while ago here.

And then my last three subjects (Psych, Business Management, HHD) were all quite similar insofar as there was a fair amount of content, and not heaps else. Some things I did to try to remember content/definitions and, later, successfully apply that knowledge to exam situations:

- I used mental images/maps/places I knew to "hide" certain information in my mind. For example, in my mind I could walk around my house, and use certain rooms as prompts to uncover information, if that makes sense. I think this is called the method of loci or similar.

- Some mornings, when a particular definition was annoying me, I just smashed it out with a rote-based approach. I know rote learning gets bad press sometimes, but genuinely I found it pretty useful for relatively basic definitions and the like.

- I loved getting tested on stuff verbally. Generally I think I'm a better writer than speaker, so I figured that if I could explain the connection between two topics verbally, or if I could verbalise a definition, I could probably do it even better in the written form.

- I went hard on summaries. I remember, say, reading a chapter of a textbook, and then trying to summarise it in one page. And then I'd try to summarise the summary. And then I'd try to summarise that summary. This was really helpful for me, because it helped me identify what was, at the crux, the most important information, and how topics interrelated. I'd really recommend this one for some subjects.

- In exams/tests, I tried to pay a lot of attention to mark allocation. For example, if a question was worth three marks, I'd try to think prior to answering what specifically those three marks would be awarded for, and approach my response accordingly.

I hope this is of some use - what subjects were you thinking for specifically?

[DPal]

If you weren't getting good SAC scores in Unit 3, but you do really well in Unit 4, will that help in terms of your ATAR score?

[Joseph41]

If you weren't getting good SAC scores in Unit 3, but you do really well in Unit 4, will that help in terms of your ATAR score?

Hey DPal! Thanks for the question, and welcome to ATAR Notes. Bit of a tough one to answer because what I'm about to say will probably sound a bit wishy-washy, but:

Yes, doing well in Unit 4 will help ATAR-wise irrespective of what you've achieved in Unit 3. And yes, you can still get a great ATAR (subjective though it is) even if you're not super happy with your SAC results through Unit 3.

There are many factors that all work together when it comes to ATAR calculation; things like subject competitiveness, cohort strength, and different assessment weightings all need to be taken into consideration, and this can make it a bit of a complicated process. As a result, it's really difficult to look just at results in isolation and provide an accurate ATAR estimate.

If you're interested, I wrote a thread a while ago called VCE Behind the Scenes: Moderation, Rankings, Scaling, Aggregates. This thread explains those concepts and how they can impact your ATAR, but knowing the behind-the-scenes stuff really isn't all that important.

At the end of the day, I recommend focusing on things you can change or have an impact over. What that's not is how you've performed on assessments that have already passed, and the technical ATAR calculation side of things. What that is is things like study methods, working out why you've dropped marks in previous SACs, and improving future performance. They're the things I'd try to focus on as much as possible.

[Rod]

Hey man who will win Big Brother 2021?

[Joseph41]

Hey man who will win Big Brother 2021?

This one got me. 😂

I actually haven't watched a single second of it - I'll probably wait until about 2041 before I give it a crack. Are you watching?

[Rod]

This one got me. 😂

I actually haven't watched a single second of it - I'll probably wait until about 2041 before I give it a crack. Are you watching?

Hahhaha was just being random

In all seriousness, your Dees have gone so well this year. Did you go to any games before the lockdown? High hopes for the season? Really happy with how well they've gone, inspiring stuff!

[Joseph41]

Hahhaha was just being random

In all seriousness, your Dees have gone so well this year. Did you go to any games before the lockdown? High hopes for the season? Really happy with how well they've gone, inspiring stuff!

Yeah mate, still go to every game I can, pretty much. I've never seen Melbourne play like we are currently - football is almost enjoyable!

[MedHopeful27]

My apologies if this has already been asked but what did you find more difficult personally, obtaining an ATAR of 99+ or maintaining a High GPA at Uni?