I’m wondering how to go about making the bound reference throughout the year ? like not sure what everyone else kinda does, any tips would be good!!
Hi there, as mentioned by Sine, there are many ways you can go about making a bound reference, but you should be aware that some ways are better than others. Your choice will also be influenced by how strong you are in maths.
Before we get into the different ways in forming a bound reference, here are a few 'do not's.
- Throughout the year, do not take existing notes and rewrite them nicely into a book. This is a waste of time. Your time should be spent perfecting tricky concepts and doing practice questions.
- Do not buy notes that have been prepared by someone else unless you are willing to study with them throughout the year. It is useless to put material in your book that isn't familiar to you. This will slow you down in the exam should you need to read it.
One (very popular) way is to just take in the book of notes you have been using throughout the entire year. For many students, this can be quite effective, especially since they were the ones who formed the notes. If you know your notes back-to-front, you will be able to access/locate information quickly should you need it in your 2nd exam.
However, I think one can improve upon just taking in their existing book of notes. It's important to realise that, although VCAA includes many similar ideas across their exams, there will
always be something new, and hence, sometimes it will be quite difficult to find the method to a question that gives you progress. So, it might be good to include all the practice exams you will do at the end of the school year with
your fully worked solutions - especially the exams with questions which you found difficult. If you see a question on the exam that looks familiar but can't figure out how to proceed, perhaps looking at a similar one may spark an idea.
How you then build on your bound reference beyond this is really dependent on the student, but I'll happily tell you how I went about mine.
(Please keep in mind - some of this may not apply to you, and so you should take this with a grain of salt). I was somewhat lucky in that I have always loved maths since I can remember, and I had amazing teachers who really pushed me to do the best I could in my early secondary years so that I could get quite far ahead. So, my focus wasn't on having notes on difficult concepts, but rather the ideas used in difficult questions. My bound references for Methods and Specialist consisted of all of my practice exams that I had been doing throughout the year organised into a specific order based on what 'type' of question I thought each was (for example: optimisation problem, modelling problem, function theory question, probability, etc.). Then, as a front cover, I had a page consisting of
all the mistakes I had made in answering questions throughout the year. When it came to a question I had doubts on in the actual exam, I just glanced at that list to make sure I had covered everything.
Something I'd like to stress, is that: your bound reference should
NOT be a guide on 'how' to answer every question. You will be digging your own grave if you start having to rely on your bound reference to answer questions. You simply do not have the time in an exam situation to refer to your book every question (90 seconds per mark)!
Anyway, this was pretty brief. There is so much involved in making a bound reference, but it's important to realise that creating one should
not be your focus during the year. It took me a day to make mine - you have plenty of time to worry about it later. Your focus during the year needs to be on learning, and if you really put in the effort to understand maths for its own sake and its applications, I think you'll find that you won't even open your bound reference during the actual exam
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