3 things to do after hsc trials

1. Practice!
If you've covered all your content, you need to continually apply what you have learnt and see how you perform on past papers. Do this under strict exam conditions and mark yourself objectively at the end. This is a good way to see if you have retained information that you have already learnt and it's more interesting than reading over your notes again.

2. Keep studying where you fall short
After you get your trial results back, there are going to be areas you performed better in than others. This could be certain subjects as a whole or certain modules/questions in a subject. Evaluate the mark you got and ask your teacher how you can improve your answer. Make sure you write these comments down so take a notebook with you when you consult
them. Reflect on how you prepared for the areas where you fell short and see how it aligns with the mark you received. You can ask yourself certain questions to identify exactly where you went wrong: You can even compare these answers to parts of the exam you did really well in and see what the differences are.

• Where did I lose my marks? Was it mainly to do with a certain topic?

If it is a certain topic, you need to go back and re-evaluate the notes you have written for this topic and see if there are any concepts you don’t understand. After, you need to apply this and practice some model answers and attempt some past papers that cover this topic.

• Why did you lose marks? Did you not know the answer? (If so, read above) Did you not answer the question?

If so, you need to identify how you’re going to ensure this doesn’t happen next time. One tip might be to highlight key words/phrases in a sentence. After you write your response you need to read the question one more time to see if you’ve answered it.
Maybe you wrote too little or too much. If you wrote too little, you may be missing elements of the syllabus dot point that help answer the question. You need to go back and identify which parts your answer is missing. After you identify that, you need to see how you can weave those missing elements into your answer so that it is coherent.
​Make sure you understand your answer rather than trying to memorise it because the question may be asked in a different way in the HSC and it becomes easier to answer when you understand the concepts/topics rather than rote leaning.
If you wrote too much, it’s likely that you either spent too much time expanding on one point and not enough on the others or you convoluted your answer by writing too much which weakened your argument/point. The best way to approach this is to decide the amount of space given for the answer and then allocate certain chunks of space to parts of the answer according to how important each part is, i.e. how many marks are allocated to parts of an answer. Also make a checklist of what is required to answer the question so that you don’t write too much and convolute your answer. As you’re writing your answer and after you finish writing your answer, if you can’t remember the question you were answering then you’ve probably strayed off from what is important so keep the questions in mind at all times.

3. Work together with peers
Before the trials, there’s a lot of competitive pressure between your colleagues at school because you are competing to get a higher internal rank amongst your peers. However, now that trials are over, team effort matters. Your internal HSC mark will be affected by how your grade performs against the rest of the schools in NSW. It’s important that you all do well so work together with your peers, share resources, help others with parts they’re struggling with and accept help from others.