How to Best Prepare for the HSC Trial Exams

In the throes of trial exams, students will inevitably find themselves having to balance multiple things at once, from studying through to revision and doing practice papers. Having gone through the journey myself, I understand the stress and anxiety that comes along in this period.

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As such, I wanted to write a short blog post detailing what I did in trials to ensure that I was managing my time effectively and solidifying my approach to the HSC.

1. Ensure that your notes for ALL subjects are written and prepared. This seems like a rather straightforward piece of advice but the main reason it’s so important is because you will be relying on these notes during your HSC preparation. HSC prep should primarily be about revising what you have already written in your notes, and in some cases putting additional details to further nourish your knowledge and understanding on certain topics.
2. Try to familiarise yourself with the structure of the exam itself. For most students, the trials exams will be the first “formal” examination and can therefore be a daunting experience. Before walking in, make sure you know exactly what the structure of the exam will be for the specific subject and plan out how you will organise our time. For example, Paper 1 for English Advanced consists of 2 sections (a short answer component and an essay component - both of which will assess your understanding of the Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences). The exam runs for 1.5 hours (not including the 15 mins reading time) which means that you might be spending 45 mins for each section if you split it evenly. Of course, if you are more confident in your essay you may then want to strategically invest more time in the short answer.
3. Identify your strengths and weaknesses by doing practice papers. I strongly suggest you take note of which questions you might be consistently stumped on and jotting this down somewhere so you know which topics and dot points from the syllabus you may need to revise just a bit more.
4. My last advice follows from the previous one and is about figuring out the ‘style’ and different ‘forms’ of questions you may get. Typically, each subject will have some common question types they ask students. Whilst the same exact question from a previous exam might not make its way to yours, often it’s just the phrasing that is altered. As such, develop a general understanding of how the exam questions typically flow like and use this to your advantage when synthesising your answers because you will be able to translate your answers from practice papers (and the structure of them as well) into your own exam (given appropriate adjustments are made to fit your particular question).

If you want more tips on how to ace the HSC exams, feel free to contact us at Concept English. Our team consists of experienced tutors who have excelled in their subjects and performed at the top of NSW.

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