A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO PREPARING FOR THE TRIALS

The HSC syllabus should be your authoritative guide.
​Go through all your syllabus dot points and tick them off as you check that you have covered all the dot points. This should be your authoritative guide and where you begin and end your preparation for the Trials and the HSC exams.

Write targeted responses for each dot point.
Science: This entails having drafted great responses for each dot point and knowing what the action verb requires you to include in your response. Check out our Instagram to see how we break down each of the verbs
English: This the new HSC Syllabus discourages route learning particularly for Module C. With this in mind, students can best prepare for this by having a deep understanding of the texts they cover. This includes the main themes explored, the quotes associated with these themes (which should be memorised) and the associated techniques with these excerpts. This ensures you have a deep understanding of the skeleton of the text and are well equipped to write up a response to the unseen essay questions.
Maths: Maths truly is all about practice and trying every variation of a question and knowing the steps to solving different types of problems. It's important to memorise important formulas and understand the step-by-step solutions for questions.

Expand, condense & expand!
A great way to really test your understanding is first to start off with your comprehensive set of notes that cover all your syllabus dot points and fleshing them out with mind maps and fleshing out difficult concepts in your own words. Then really spend the time to familiarise yourself with these notes. Then condense these notes to be clear and you really want to be left with the bare skeleton of the notes. These should really look like a slightly more comprehensive set of syllabus dot points. These set of notes should be made whilst cutting from the original comprehensive set of notes you made yourself.
Then whilst looking at your condensed set of notes, try to flesh them out to include further explanations, mind maps and diagrams. Do this without looking at your original set of notes. Try do this for whole topics and then compare the notes to your original comprehensive set of notes to see if you missed anything.
After this, what you really should be able to do is look at a syllabus dot point and write a comprehensive response, similar to the original notes you have.

Tips
1. Try to include examples in your responses. These will help pull your marks up higher.
2. Try some memory techniques such as mnemonics or by reviewing formulas for topics every week.

Practice papers

Finally, put everything to practice by going over previous papers.
Do these practice papers under strict exam conditions and if possible get another person to mark it. At SKY HSC College, we regularly do mock HSC and Trial exam papers which are marked by HSC Specialists. To find out more enquire now!
To get access to The Independent Schools Trial past papers, click below to find the link in our blog post discussing everything there is to know about the Trial exams.

ist papers

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