Studying for Math

[Fury Flint]

Hello, currently I'm doing prelim ext math and would like to know how people study for math throughout the term. Obviously past papers are the best option after exam content is covered but what do you do before that? (after completing homework of course)

[RuiAce]

Personal experience: Very little; I relied quite heavily on my homework when I was not doing past papers. (Of course having said that ATAR Notes wasn't around during my HSC year so I had no external resources like that to help me out.) I also plucked out relevant questions from past papers to do anyway, and just skipped those that were not relevant at the time. The internet has heaps of past papers for maths so this is never a problem.

Some common strategies that people do:
- Redoing questions, especially those that they previously got wrong.
- Building up a personal formula book/sheet that's more comprehensive than the NESA one This can also come with a "methods" book (e.g. when to use a geometry theorem, what process to follow for tackling common questions)
- Doing more than the homework (when time permits)
- Actually going further and reading the proofs of all the theorems in the course (it lets people understand where the results come from a bit more)
- Create a "silly mistakes they encounter" list