AT 11am every day, St Leo’s Catholic College principal, Anthony Gleeson, switches on the radio and tunes in to the COVID-19 press conference to keep up with announcements affecting his year 12 students.
Gleeson said he is inundated with queries and concerns from confused and stressed students, parents, and teachers when there is a change in advice.
“As soon as the Premier makes the announcement, we’ve got parents and students and staff wanting to know what happens.”
But Gleeson doesn’t have majority of the answers.
“That’s when the problems come in because we don’t know what the details are either,” he said. “And that causes anxiety with the students. That’s the biggest concern: the uncertainty, the anxiety that’s created in year 12 students.”
The same can be said for students and staff at Loreto Normanhurst. Loreto Normanhurst principal, Marina Ugonotti, said the biggest challenge she has had to deal with is the uncertainty.
“It certainly has been challenging for us to provide students, families and staff with a degree of certainty and clarity at a time when so much continues to change,” Ugonotti said.
“Our aim is that our year 12 students achieve the best academic outcomes and are given the appropriate opportunities to demonstrate their growth and learning, while ensuring their safety and wellbeing, and that of staff, during this time.”
Year 12 students were scheduled to return to school on August 16. But Premier Gladys Berejiklian backflipped on the decision due to persistent high case numbers across Greater Sydney. Instead, students have limited access and can only return to school for a maximum of two hours.
It is unclear as to whether students will be returning to school sit HSC exams given the current outbreak. However, planning is underway to ensure student safety should they be given the green light in October.
“Planning continues for HSC exams to proceed from 19 October in a COVID-safe way, in line with Health advice,” the NSW Department of Education website said.
For students who may be struggling to focus on their studies amid the current lockdown restrictions, Barker College alumni and tutor at Premier Tutors, Rhys Mackintosh, who achieved an ATAR of 99.95 and placed third in NSW for Chemistry last year, offers a few study tips to achieve your best in the 2021 HSC.
1. Make your own notes. It is often easy to get notes from friends, but to maximise your study efficiency you should write your own notes and ideally hand-write them. This improves your ability to recall compared to typed notes.
2. Focus on completing practice papers. Memorising content is important, and notes should be made early to ensure this, but it is equally valuable to learn how to take exams and be comfortable responding to questions.
3. Complete past papers and trials from other schools. Every teacher and every school is different, so they will have different focuses on the syllabus that can broaden your knowledge base and help you craft more universal, ‘marker-proof’ responses.
4. Read the marking criteria. After completing practices, you shouldn’t just mark your papers, but learn where the marks are allocated from the criteria. This helps you to plan future responses to guarantee you are ticking all the boxes.
5. Don’t wear yourself out. It is far better for your learning and wellbeing to do a little bit of work over the course of months in the lead up to the HSC, than it is to go all in only a couple weeks before. In the end you’ll save yourself a lot of hassle and stress by being a consistent worker from now until the end of your exams.
