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

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Taking a weekend off to go surfing

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Playing Sport, or going to gym

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Talking to a girlfriend/boyfriend

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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.

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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 5th July at Epping. www.geniusacademy.com.au 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 www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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! www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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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HSC Success Strategy: 

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

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Reducing your study time will allow you to reduce procrastination and minimize Parkinson‟s Law.

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

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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 5th July at Epping. 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 www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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 www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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 www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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.

HSC Success Strategy: 

Focus on developing memory by creating connections and relationships between ideas and experiences

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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.

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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 5th July at Epping. www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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. www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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.

HSC Success Strategy: 

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

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Recreate exam conditions when studying – study in timed conditions

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Complete at least 4 past HSC Exam questions

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Use summarized notes to memorize

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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 5th July at Epping. www.geniusacademy.com.au www.geniusacademy.com.au

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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

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