How to Get the Edge to HSC Success

8/18/2019 How to Get the Edge to HSC Success

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Super-Charging Your Motivation

CHAPTER 2: Vanquishing Procrastination

CHAPTER 3: Boosting Your Memory

CHAPTER 4: Acing Your Exams

CHAPTER 5: Keep up the inspiration


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CHAPTER 1: Super-Charging Your Motivation

„Motivation will almost always beat mere talent‟ – Anon.

The first step on the pathway to academic success is motivation. Motivation

however is more than a spark, which inspires you into action. Motivation is a

mindset that allows you to sustain action, and remain focused and energised

throughout Year 12.

Motivation is consequently essential to ensure that you equip yourself to study and

prepare consistently in the lead up to your Trials and HSC Exams. Typically, the

commonly recommended strategy to develop motivation is to sit down and

develop goals – a goal for a particular ATAR, or specific subject goals, e.g. 90% in

Advanced English. While setting a goal is an important step to creating direction,

and a long term focus, based on our research with 98+ ATAR students, and

working with tens of thousands of students, large goals like an ATAR, or a mark in

a subject are not necessarily the most effective way to developing motivation that

empowers you to take consistent action every day.

Why? There are two key problems with large over-arching goals.

1. They are long-term

2. They are intangible


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When you have set a goal for the future, like scoring a particular ATAR, often

there is no effort to chart a pathway in the short term to achieve this long term

goal. As a result, a goal like a particular ATAR can seem very far away, and

not always very relevant to your day to day activities.

Because an ATAR goal feels far away and not necessarily relevant to your day

to day activities, when you are studying during the year, and feel like

procrastinating and taking the day off, typically the large goal of an ATAR

(which is essentially an abstract number) will not be sufficient to keep you

motivated and inspire you to continue working. This is because the goal is not

something you touch, feel, or experience within your immediate future.

The key therefore to super-charging your motivation lies in setting short-term

goals – tangible goals that during the year you will be able to see, feel and

experience, so that when you feel like procrastinating, and avoiding study, you

have something in your immediate future to inspire you to consistent action.

What types of short term goals can you set?

Short term tangible goals need to be things that are:

1. Fun – something that you really enjoy doing

2. An experience – something you can experience in some way


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Examples of short term goals that top performing students set themselves

included:

Going to a friend‟s party on the weekend

Taking a weekend off to go surfing

Playing Sport, or going to gym

Talking to a girlfriend/boyfriend

Watching a movie, or favorite TV show

Top students would set a goal to go a party, or play sport, or watch a movie –

to reach this goal however, they would need to complete a pre-determined

amount of study (in terms of output, and not time).

If they did not complete the pre-determined amount of study, they would not

reach their goal, and would not take the weekend off to go surfing, or to their

friend‟s party.

Why did this work as a way to encourage consistent, daily motivation and

action?

Because top students set goals to participate in activities that they loved,

where immediate, and they could experience, whenever they felt like

procrastinating, and not studying, they realized that they would lose out on the

opportunity to participate in the event or experience, and this motivated them


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to study. In other words, by setting short term goals to do something they

loved, they could harness their motivation to have fun, to stay energized, and

focused to study!

While this might seem counter intuitive to set goals to schedule in „fun

activities‟ during Year 12 (especially when most people will encourage you to

quit extra-curricular activities), this is something that top students regularly did

throughout Year 12 to help them remain motivated so they could excel

academically.

HSC Success Strategy:

Set yourself short term tangible goals – so goals that you can enjoy,

and experience. Make a commitment that you will not engage in this

experience unless you complete a pre-determined amount of study.

Schedule in a minimum of one short term goal each week to help you

remain focused, and energized on a daily basis.

For more tools and strategies to help you stay super-motivated during the lead up

to your Trials and HSC Exams, get your tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC

Success Summit, on 5 th July at Epping.

www.geniusacademy.com.au

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CHAPTER 2: Vanquishing Procrastination

„Procrastination is the thief of time‟ – Edward Young

The second step on the pathway to achieving academic excellence is

vanquishing procrastination. While you may be motivated, and want to work

with high levels of intensity, inevitably, as you become tired, and the year

stretches on, that old enemy, procrastination begins to creep into your

schedule. With over 10 units to prepare for during Year 12, time is a valuable

commodity, and vanquishing procrastination and maximizing your use of time

is therefore vital to help you prepare adequately across all your subjects so

that you excel in your HSC.

To successfully vanquish procrastination, it is important to first understand

what procrastination is, and why is occurs.

What is procrastination?

Procrastination essentially is the postponement of high priority activities or low

priority activities. For example, it is where you will postpone creating study

notes for a subject to instead chat to a friend on Facebook.

Why does it occur?

Procrastination can be best understood by Parkinson‟s Law. Parkinson‟s law

states that:

- Work will expand to fill available time


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What does this mean?

Let us illustrate with an example. You come home from school at about 4pm.

You take a moment to plan your afternoon. You realize that because it‟s a

Monday, you have nothing planned all afternoon (in terms of extra-curricular

activities), and therefore have about 4-5 hours across the afternoon/night to

study (roughly from 4pm – 10pm).

What happens?

Typically, you begin studying and then because you know that you have „lots

of time‟ to complete your study, when you get a little bored, you stop studying,

and surf the net. You then return and study for another 20 minutes, and then

get hungry and stop studying (because you have „lots of time‟), and visit the

kitchen to eat some food.

This pattern of starting and stopping studying continues all night, and by the

time you reach 10pm, you feel drained (from your „4-5 hours of study‟), but

you haven‟t really achieved all that much.

Does this sound familiar? Has this happened to you before?

This is a prime example of the impact of Parkinson‟s Law. While your actual

study in the above example may have only taken 2-3 hours if you were

working effectively and efficiently without procrastinating, it has taken you 4-5

hours (the whole night). Your work, or study, has expanded to fill the available

time you have given yourself. Additionally, because you have been


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procrastinating, you have not really studied effectively, or relaxed completely,

causing you to be drained.

How can you use Parkinson’s Law to your advantage?

Give yourself less time to study!

We are going to repeat this as it is so important.

Give yourself less time to study.

Now you might be thinking – LESS TIME!!! I already don‟t have enough time

to complete my study, homework, and prepare for exams across 10 units.

How will giving myself less time solve anything?

Giving yourself less time to study will create the following 3 benefits:

1) Reduce Impact of Parkinson’s Law

By giving yourself less time to study, according to Parkinson‟s Law, your work

will now only expand to your smaller time frame.

For example; If you came home on a school night and instead of just sitting

down and „studying‟ for the whole night, you allocated yourself a strict 2 hour

study time period, and then scheduled in other fun/extra-curricular activities

after, even if you sit down to study and begin procrastinating, because you

had a new, 2 hour deadline, the work you have allocated will only expand to fill

this time. Hence, limiting your time is a great way to limit your procrastination!


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2) Increase Intensity and Urgency of Study

When you train for sport, and you are trying to improve your fitness, do you

run really slowly for a long time, or do you try and push yourself, and improve

your speed within shorter and shorter time limits?

Effective studying is just like effective training for sport. The higher intensity

you study at the more you will remember and recall. By reducing your time

frame for studying, you are forcing yourself to increase the intensity of your

study, and what you achieve in the time period.

3) Enjoy Leisure Time

Finally, by giving yourself specific and limited time period for study, you are

creating distinct periods of study, and leisure. This is very important, as often

what happens is you begin studying, and then procrastinate by watching TV,

or surfing the internet, but you are not really truly relaxing, because, in the

back of your mind you know that you really should be studying. The result is

that you end up having lots of „dead time‟. Time that is not being used

productively to study or relax is dead time – it has no purpose. By limiting your

study time, and scheduling in leisure time afterwards you will be able to

recharge and relax more effectively, which is necessary to ensure you do not

burn out across Year 12.


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Reduce the time you give yourself to study. Focus on short, sharp

intense periods of study.

Reducing your study time will allow you to reduce procrastination and

minimize Parkinson‟s Law.

Parkinson‟s Law states that work expands to fill available time.

Reducing your study time period will also help you reduce dead time,

and relax more effectively preventing burn-out.

For more tools and strategies to help minimize your procrastination and increase

the intensity of your study during the lead up to your Trials and HSC Exams, get

your tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC Success Summit, on 5 th July at

Epping.


http://www.geniusacademy.com.au/http://www.geniusacademy.com.au/http://www.geniusacademy.com.au/


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CHAPTER 3: Boosting you memory

„We do not remember days, we remember moments” – Cesare Pavese

The third thing we can do to move us ahead into academic success is to

remember what we have studied and learned effectively. We have found that this

is a great challenge many students face and is a very common problem even for

university students. So the good news is that you are not alone, in fact, chances

are that by the time you have read this chapter, you would have forgotten most of

what you have read in the last 2 chapters in detail already.

Now our memory works in a very specific way and if we train it to work effectively,

it can perform much better than we expect it to. So it‟s important to train your mind

so that it works effectively for you. Before we look at practical ways to train our

mind to recall better, let‟s look at how our memory works very briefly.

How memory works

The way memory first works is like walking around your school for the first time,

remember that? When you first walked around the school, everything is new and

so it‟s the first time your minds is taking in the information and are exposed to it.

Everything would be very unfamiliar, the classes, the office, the gym, the canteen

are all unfamiliar. On the second day though, you get the idea but may not still be

familiar with the layout of the school. Over time though, you get use to it and I bet

you could literally walk around your school blindfolded now. Why, because we


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have built enough connections in our minds for it to be second nature. Now our

memory works similarly, and so, information that is fed to the mind becomes more

and more familiar/ makes more connections and we remember more of it when we

have been exposed to it long enough. These „connections‟ in your brain are called

synaptic gaps. Without going too much in detail, they are basically formed when

one cell gets an electric impulse and forms a „thread‟ and makes a connection with

another. The more times the connection is made, the stronger the connection

becomes and the easier it becomes to travel that path again. So the key here is to

build strong connections.

There are 2 basic ways to do this:

1) Through repetition or rote memorisation – while this is the most commonly

used method, smart learners realise that repetition can be useful if time is

on their side. Time however is often a luxury, and I am sure you may not

feel that way when studying in the lead up to your exams. This strategy of

rote learning is based on the theory that our minds function like computers

– really however our minds work best when the information makes sense

and is understood.

2) Through the creation of relationships and connections – this involves

making each connection make sense and linking ideas to current

information and experiences to understand the information better. These

connections create a web of knowledge that can be very useful when

recalling what was learned. This also means that you give it the best


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opportunity to make strong connections every time you commit to learning

or studying. A cognitive scientist and researcher Marvin Minsky once

quoted, “If you understand something in only one way, then you don‟t really

understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends

on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected

representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things

from many perspectives until you find one that works

How to further boost your memory

1) Involve as many senses.

According to research,

We retain: 10% to what we read,

20% of what we hear

30% of what we see

50% of what we hear and see

70% of what we say

And a whopping 90% of what we say and do!

The idea here is to then do more than just read your notes. The key here is to

involve as many of your senses when studying. One way is to ask yourself which

way you actually prefer studying. If you feel that you are more a visual person and


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prefer to read your notes, make sure you spend time imagining the study notes

and see it playing out in your mind or diagramming what you study using pictures,

mind maps or basic models and pictures. This process is called visualisation. At

the summit, we actually show you how this is done is greater detail and share with

you studies that are done that show you how visualisation works. If you are more

an auditory person, then reading your notes aloud can sometimes help. What is

really interesting is that the more we involve our senses, the better chances our

minds have in building those connections.

2) Use Metaphors, Analogy and stories

Be creative in creating metaphors, analogies and stories that mean something to

you. This could be an event, a place or a person that you are familiar with. The

more these three things mean to you, the more memorable the facts and figures

will be. We will go in more detail in the summit and show you some real examples

of study notes that are really creative.

3) Apply memory techniques

Memory train/ pegging is a method that we go though in greater detail at the

summit to remember more complex and large amounts of facts or numbers.

Memory champions and really effective learners use these methods as it is good

for both long term and short term memory. We can‟t go through all memory

techniques here, but at the summit, we will be going through some key and very


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practical memory techniques that works and that are used by students who

achieved high ATAR scores.


Focus on developing memory by creating connections and relationships

between ideas and experiences

When you study, make sure you make it as active as possible – avoid

simply reading. Try to take notes, talk to someone, or teach a friend. This

will improve your memory retention.

Use visualization techniques including metaphors, analogies, stories, and

memory pegging to improve your recall.

For more tools and strategies to help you study smart, and improve your memory

retention and recall during the lead up to your Trials and HSC Exams, get your

tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC Success Summit, on 5 th July at Epping.




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CHAPTER 4: Acing Your Exams

“Study while others are sleeping; work while others are loafing; prepare while others are

playing; and dream while others are wishing.” ~ William A. Ward

Here are 5 very practical tips you can use to PREPARE for your exams.

1) Get a personal tutor/ coach to help with preparations

A wise teacher once said to me that “A journey of a thousand miles begin

with one single step and having someone encourage one to put one foot in

front of the other”. You have already started your journey and getting a

personal tutor or coach can be the biggest help in continuing to prepare for

your exams. The next few months is critical to doing well for your HSC and

it is also the easiest time to lose motivation to study. A tutor/ coach can also

be a source of inspiration and great help with keeping you accountable to

study and help in very subject specific questions.

2) Put yourself in as many exam situations as possible

Preparing for the HSC exam is like preparing for a grand final for a sport.

The more experienced a player or a team is in the environment, the better

they perform when the real event happens. It is vital to get familiar with the

time constraints of the exams and the format of the questions. Put yourself

through exam scenarios on a regular basis and make it more regular closer

to the actual exams. Make sure you set yourself time limits and stick to

them.


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3) Do as many past year papers as possible

Building on the last tip, doing past year paper is one of the best strategy to

prepare yourself to acing the exams. When you prepare for a grand final or

any competitive sport, the best teams are usually the ones that have

dedicated most amount of time in simulated or actual games. This helps the

team prepare mentally, physically and emotionally for the game. Similarly

with doing past year papers, you will get familiar with the style of questions

and the format of questions. Schedule so that you do at least 4 past year

papers, completed and checked before the HSC exams. This is where a

coach or tutor can come in handy.

4) Go through summarised and memorised notes

Notes are one of the most important things to get done to a very

satisfactory level before an exam. The reason for this is that you want to be

going through the notes on a high level a week or a few days before the

exams. If you have prepared good notes prior to your exams, you are half

way to acing your HSC. At the Summit, we actually show you how to

prepare your notes using various memory techniques that have been

proven to work and that successful students use to prepare their notes

before an exam. It is never too late to prepare well summarised notes and

notes that use memory techniques.


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5) Learn from successful students

We have found the key ingredient to acing an exam is to find out what

study techniques works for you personally and apply it. Success models

success. We have found that may smart students invest and spend time

studying and learning how other successful students do well. It really isn‟t

only about studying hard, it is about learning how to study smart and

studying harder! We encourage you to look at workshops and study skills

seminars that can be a really boost to help you in your last few weeks

leading up to your HSC. The more you equip yourself and learn how to best

study, the more advantage you have in applying the strategies to help you

get the edge.


Get a coach or tutor to guide you and help you prepare for the HSC

Recreate exam conditions when studying – study in timed conditions

Complete at least 4 past HSC Exam questions

Use summarized notes to memorize

Learn from successful students

For more tools and strategies to help you prepare for your Trials and HSC Exams,

get your tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC Success Summit, on 5 th July at

Epping.




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CHAPTER 5: Keep up the inspiration

“If you love what you do, you will never work another day in your life.” ~ Confucius

One of my favourite stories was told by my parents. A long time ago in the

Northern part of Southern China lived a very wise and elderly man. This wise man

was respected for his wisdom and knowledge and was known throughout the

village. People enjoyed coming to listen to him as they always walked away with

lessons in life and felt very inspired after they listened to his stories. One day the

village he lived in experienced an unusually dry season and their crops were all

dying. The villagers got lazy in digging holes for water and became very frustrated

in having to walk for miles to fetch water from a river. Everyone became very

demotivated and started to worry about the future of their village.

So the chief of the village called the people together to come listen to the wise

man. They wanted to know if the village had any hope of surviving this dry season.

He took out a bird from his clasped hand and asked the villagers whether the bird

was dead or alive. Everyone looked at each other and discussed it amongst

themselves and were confused. Some said dead, some alive and many others just

didn‟t know. The wise man then said, “the fate of the bird depends on me”. “What

do you mean?” said a young lady. Well, he said, if you say it is dead, then I let the

live bird go from my hands and hence it is alive. If you said it was alive, I would

squeeze it so hard that it would suffocate and die. The fate of the bird depends on


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me. Just like the destiny and future of your life depends on each of you. Your

future destiny is in your hands. The journey begins now for you, whether you are

fulfilled, happy doing what you love and loving what you do depends on what you

do now.

Remember that along your journey, you may or may not encounter people that

would discourage you from fulfilling your dreams because they may not know

better themselves or they want you to be like them. It is called tall poppy

syndrome. Just remember to keep your mind and heart on your dream. The Real

Challenge is to be your real and true self in a world that tries to encourage you to

be like everyone else. We wish you all the very best in your future destiny and

look forward to one day meeting you in person.

Till then, remember to Get Real, Be Real, Stay Real and keep up the inspiration.

What You Think, You Create

What You Feel, You Attract

What You Imagine, You Become

You can BE, DO and HAVE Anything You Set Your Heart and Mind To.

All the best for your HSC and beyond,

Rowan Kunz and Colin Lee

How to Get the Edge to HSC Success

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