In preparation for upcoming exams, many students tend to go straight to rewriting notes, highlighting, and underlining and creating summary sheets. I believe many of these strategies create the illusion of productivity and effectiveness in terms of exam prep, and that none of these methods can compare to the effectiveness of past papers.

Many believe that they should not progress to past papers until they have mastered all of the content. I find that when students do this, they end up not completing past papers until a few days before the exam, which puts them at a significant disadvantage to their peers.

Past papers should ultimately be the first point of action in a revision cycle. Completing a paper that includes content from all topics that will be covered in the exam provides students with a thorough grasp of what they do and do not know after they mark it. This hence provides the student with a starting point for what they should then go and start revising and putting their focus towards, rather than just randomly reviewing notes.

After doing an initial paper, this is when the student can start implementing a specific focus on topics/areas of weakness. However, there should still be a continued focus on completing past papers while this process is occurring to ensure that the student is actually improving in these areas of weakness while still remaining strong in other areas. Past papers act as a continuous feedback loop that helps the student continually improve in the lead-up to the exam.

Another significant benefit of past papers is that they train exam technique, informing students of their time management, and how long they should be spending on each question. Students will understand how much time they need to allocate to various components of the exam, including multiple choice, short answers and extended responses, and the time to mark allocation ratio. Students also start to pick up patterns in how a specific school’s papers are structured or how HSC papers are structured, maybe noticing questions from a specific part of the syllabus year-on-year.

Ultimately, a large part of a student’s academic success is how well they can apply themselves when revising for an exam, and how they can use past papers to their advantage.

Hayden McCarthy