Over the last fortnight, during the school holidays, your focus should have been on building a strong knowledge base, through the creation and re-writing of notes.

In the coming fortnight, your focus should now shift towards working on practice papers & writing practice essays. While you may still have some homework from school, I would make it a priority instead to work on practice papers.

A good way you can do this is set a particular practice paper to work on each day – so Monday, work on a Maths past paper, on Tuesday, construct an English essay in response to a past HSC question , and continue this throughout the week.

The other option you have, is instead to break up your time (so let’s say 3 hours of study time when you return from school), into 2 x 1.5 hours periods.

Use each of these periods to work on a different past paper, or essay. Of course, you will not be able to finish the whole paper in this time, but you will be able to this way work on a wider subject range each night.

What subject should you begin working on? There are a number of options. You could either begin studying for the subject you have the most trouble in, or the subject you are the most confident in. Another option is to begin working on subjects in order of when you must sit these exams, or working in reverse chronological order.

Which option is the best? There are a number of pros and cons for each one. I recommend working chronologically, and the day before your exam, going back over your material to brush up again, and refresh your memory.

The other option I suggest is to work on your strongest subject, and get that out of the way quickly (because you require less work). Then begin working on your subjects in order of difficulty, with a mind towards when you will be sitting the exam.

I know all of this sounds confusing – at the end of the day, you need to pick something you feel comfortable with. My research with 98+ UAI students revealed that all of these strategies were used, however the two that I recommend where the most popular. (I used them myself!)

Hope this helps,

Rowan