Hello VCE students and parents,
With term 3 soon coming to its end and term 4 around the corner, it is more than ever the time to prepare for exams. This exam preparation inherently brings a lot of stress and doubts to students, and that’s what our job is: to help you get ready for this rough period and come out successful from this battle. While we try our best yearlong to prepare your knowledge and study discipline to overcome exams, these are put to test during term 4, and that’s also when we deliver you with the range of tips and advice that will make of you a rock star in VCE.
From experience, those are the issues occurring the most often:
- Burnout
Students tend to cram and overwork themselves in preparation for their exams. While this is the only solution when studying is left to the last minute, it certainly is not the most effective one. To prevent burnout when preparing for VCE exams, have a comprehensive schedule where you factor in all of your occupations. This way, you will allocate specific time when you will study, which will make your studying much more effective as you will reduce the temptation to do other things. Don’t forget to reserve time to exercise, socialize and relax! Often, a feeling of guilt emerges for those who take time for self-care. It really is not wasted time: you need it to keep your stress and doubts in check.
In your schedule, you should prioritize what tasks and activities you want to occupy most of your time with and work from there with the unallocated time you have left.
- Work-life balance
During year 12, work can be both an outlet and a burden if incorrectly managed. While getting your own money, freedom, and autonomy is extremely desirable, managers will often disregard your goals to succeed in your VCE and push you to work more. This is why it is best to have a fixed schedule that you can stick to in order to preserve a healthy amount of time to study, and favor workplaces that give you a high degree of flexibility in your schedule. Tough hours such as late night and overnight are often hard to mix with studying and socializing, it is recommended to stay away from those shifts if you are able to.
- Effective study
When you finally get to sit down at your desk and start studying, that’s often when the temptation to open TikTok takes over and you find yourself scrolling through the app for hours on end. Don’t ruin your schedule which you worked hard on making perfect: make your time worthwhile. Take away any sort of distraction, tell your best mate you’ll be back in a couple of hours, and get on with grinding this homework that is waiting for you. Find what works best for you: specific study tools, working in a group, anything. In the end, everyone studies differently but no one studies well with distractions around.
- Network
Your time in VCE is valuable, not only because it can definitely shift your pathway for the future for the best, but also because this will often be the last time you will cross paths with brilliant people who will achieve equally great things as you will later in life. This is an opportunity for you to create extremely precious, lifelong bonds that can later come in handy. In the shorter term, those bonds can be equally as advantageous: those fellow students are going through the exact same challenges as you do, and it is good in such times to help each other with understanding and working through course materials. It is often said that fully understanding a topic implies for someone else to be able to understand it when you explain them. The inverse statement is just as valid, if someone explains a topic that you don’t understand, it brings you a step closer to succeeding in your homework and assignments.
Those are only a handpicked selection from the broad range of advice we have to give you to succeed in VCE. Our goal is of course to equip you with all the advice, skills, and information you will need for your exams, and that can only be done through tailored education. Our staff is highly trained and dedicated to providing you with everything you might need, so come and ask someone from our team for their tips and tricks, we will guide you in any way we can!