BlogStudyThe Ultimate Month Before Your HSC Exams Study Plan!

The Ultimate Month Before Your HSC Exams Study Plan!

Need a killer HSC Exams study plan?

50% – That’s how much your HSC Exams are worth.

And guess what… there’s only one month left!

Regardless of how well or how poorly you went in your Trials and internal assessments, there’s still a massive opportunity to ace your HSC just around the corner.

That’s why in this video, I’m going to share with you a step by step guide on how to create an awesome HSC study plan a month out from exams!

Step #1: Conduct a Post-Trials, Post-Mortem
Step #2: Use Your Feedback
Step #3: Identify Your Weak Areas
Step #4: Create a Wall Chart
Step #5: Pretend That You’re Still at School

Step #1: Conduct a Post-Trials, Post-Mortem

Ultimately, if you’re going to change your results from trials to your HSC, you HAVE to change your study habits.

If you don’t, you’re going to get the same results in your HSC, and we want to avoid that at all costs!

However, actually changing your habits isn’t an easy thing to do.

If you want to change, you need to be super intentional about it when you create your HSC Exams study plan.

But how??

A great tactic is to do something we like to call the KSS Protocol

This is a really great strategy you can use to make sure that you enact change in your study habits moving toward the HSC.

All you need to do is follow three simple steps:

K – Keep

The first thing I want you to do is to write down the subject you did the absolute worst in during your Trials.

I know this might bring up some unpleasant memories but it’s really important!

Now once you’ve done that, I want you to ask yourself:

“what did I do well in my study leading up to that exam?”

Once you’ve identified this, I want you to make sure that you continue focusing on it when creating your HSC exams study plan.

If you’re changing your study habits, you don’t need to throw absolutely EVERYTHING out the window. So be careful not to get rid of an effective study habit!

S – Stop

The next question you should ask is:

What are some things I did that just didn’t work?

Maybe you were studying late the night before and cramming. Maybe you had really messy notes. Write a list of all the things that negatively impacted your study.

Now, this is really simple, but what I want you to do is STOP doing these things leading up to your HSC exams.

While this may seem obvious, making yourself write it down as a list will help you identify what’s been holding you back and keep it in mind heading into the future.

S – Start

The final thing I want you to reflect on is: What could I do differently?

Now that you understand your strengths as well as what you’ve been doing wrong, you can start to identify what needs to change in your approach for the HSC exams.

Once you’ve come up with some ideas WRITE THEM DOWN. Pin the piece of paper up on your wall so you can refer back and add to it.

Now that you’ve done this for your worst subject, you can move on to identifying what you need to keep, start and stop for all of your other subjects.

This will allow you to be far more intentional in how you change up your study habits and keep up your momentum for the HSC!

Step #2: Use Your Feedback!

Let’s be real, most of the time what happens when you get your exam paper back from your Trials is your teacher does an exam review and you take a look at everything you did wrong.

This is great, you need to do this. But let’s be honest – is it really going to change your behaviour the next time you get a similar question?

I mean think about it. If you were a basketball player and you missed a shot in the game, would your coach telling you that you had your feet in the wrong place help you make the shot in your next game?

It might be helpful knowledge, but in the moment, you’re not going to get it right unless you actually go and do some reps and practice shooting with the correct form.

The same thing applies to your Trials. What you critically need to do is actually go back over the mistakes that you made and retake them. Do every single one from scratch and get them right.

As a result, when you get to a similar exam question you’ll be far more likely to get it right!

For further info on how to decipher an apply teacher feedback, check out this article!

Step #3: Identify Your Weak areas

Ultimately, in the gap between trials and your HSC, the goal is to go back and fix all the stuff that you got wrong in your trials.

Most of the time, however, we tend to avoid the weak areas because, well, it’s hard right? In turn, we tend to pick the easier stuff first.

While it may be painful, it’s really critical that you focus on the stuff that’s going to move the needle in the biggest way, and this is your weak areas.

So, how do you do this?

Well it’s really simple, you go back over your Trials papers and feedback, and identify where you made mistakes.

You should look at things such as what topics or question types you struggled with.

After this, you need to make a clear hit-list of your weak areas, as this is going to help us with our next important step…

Step #4: Create a Wall Chart

Now, a wall chart, honestly, is a fancy name for something really simple. However, it’s going to contribute greatly to keeping you on track with your HSC study plan.

Firstly, pick one of your subjects and on a piece of paper write the following down at the top:

  • Name of the subject
  • Your HSC Goal Mark

Screenshot 2016-05-05 14.47.02

Then draw 2 lines down the page to break the piece of paper into thirds.

At the top of each column write the following:
  • Week 1
  • Week 2
  • Week 3
  • Week 4

It will now look like this.

Now take 10 minutes for each column to write a to-do list for everything you need to for that particular subject over the next 4 weeks to give you the best shot of scoring your goal mark that you’ve written at the top of the page!

Keep in mind, when choosing tasks for your to-do list, be VERY specific. You should also aim to focus on the weak areas identified in the previous step!

Here’s an example of what this should look like.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve now got your month before the HSC wall chart! 

Now all you need to do is…. put it up on your wall.

Step #5: Pretend That You’re Still at School

Honestly, as soon as school ends there’s one thing that EVERYONE is going to want to do:

SLEEP IN!

However, this is a really bad idea.

Often what’ll happen is you’ll sleep in, and maybe by the time you start studying it’s lunchtime. The problem then is that by the time you get work done, it’s late in the evening.

This means that you go to sleep later because you want some chill time, you want to relax, hang out with friends, watch a movie.

The problem is, the next day you sleep in even more!

It’s a nasty cycle. It’s also changing the habits and routines that you’ve had over the last six or seven years as part of school.

A simple way to solve this in the 30 days leading up to your HSC exams is to pretend you’re still at school.

You need to wake up and start studying when school would start. When it’s recess that’s when you take a break. When the lunch bell would ring, that’s when you have lunch.

This means that you’ve done six hours every day of solid study which is awesome, but you’re also getting some time to relax and enjoy yourself after the school day would typically end!

Now, you might still be sitting there thinking:

“six hours isn’t enough. I did really poor in my Trials and I’m screwed!”

Well, even if you study until 5 p.m every day, that’ll give you roughly 8 hours of study per day which is quite a lot.

Honestly, if you’re telling people you’re studying 12 hours a day it really means that there’s something wrong with the quality of your study.

Eight hours of hard work and your brain should be fried, leaving you plenty of time to check off, chill out, relax and stay healthy over the course of your journey.

If you follow all of these steps, we’re confident that you’ll be far more prepared when the time comes to sit your exams!

Are you looking for a tutor to help you in your final month of the HSC?

We pride ourselves on our inspirational coaches and mentors!

We offer tutoring and mentoring for Years K-12 in a large variety of subjects, with personalised lessons conducted one-on-one in your home or at our state of the art campus in Hornsby!

To find out more and get started with an inspirational tutor and mentor get in touch today! 

Give us a ring on 1300 267 888, email us at [email protected] or check us out on Facebook!

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