Solid Studying Tips

Studying for those exams is a gradual accumulation of knowledge and understanding. Over the next seven school terms, you will be piling up facts, figures, formulas, tricks, quotes, pictures, diagrams, and other pieces of information, week by week, period by period, lesson by lesson, one at a time, all in your brain. You are now a blank canvas and the knowledge and skills of your chosen HSC subjects will be painted onto your intellect over the next two years until you emerge as a beautiful creation ready to respond confidently to the questions in your HSC papers. What is study?

You say you would like to receive study tips from me. My first tip is this: seriously consider what you mean by the word 'study'. If you have never considered this, then listen to what I have to say. To study means to train your mind on a point. If you are looking intently at an insect on a leaf, and your mind is focused in it, then you are studying the insect. Your mind, Samarth, is like a torch that can be focused on a particular point to illuminate that point. So what does it mean to study a HSC subject? What does it mean to study, say, Chemistry? Studying a HSC subject means training your mind on that subject, like focusing a torch light on a particular point. So if you are studying chemistry, then you are focusing your mind on chemistry. In other words, you are thinking about the concepts of chemistry, you are working with chemical processes and equations, you are solving problems that concern chemistry, you are adding and subtracting chemical terms, and you are reading and writing literature that has to do with chemistry. Samarth, some students don't understand this. They believe that studying means reading over class notes that they have copied from the whiteboard over the term. In fact, the definition of 'study' that I have explained to you above involves much more than reading notes. It involves answering questions related to your subject, whether those questions come