Barker College alumni and tutor at Premier Tutors, Rhys Mackintosh, who achieved an ATAR of 99.95 and placed third in NSW for Chemistry in 2020, offers a few study tips to achieve your best in the 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. 

First Published within "Confusion, anxiety and stress: Schools face biggest challenge ahead of HSC exams"