Year 12 Trials - A reflection

After 6 days of sore hands, tired brains and restless sleep, our year 12 trial exams have finally finished. It was extremely difficult cramming the exams for all 6 subjects into 6 days but now that they are over I'm extremely grateful that they have been completed. Trial examinations are not meant to be easy. They are meant to be hard work and expose the areas of our learning that we need to focus on for our real exams in a few months.

Our psychology examination was our second exam on Tuesday of last week. We completed all 3 papers (for a total of 5 hours of writing!) in one day, which I would have to say was probably one of the toughest exams in terms of writing.

I believe I did pretty well, and am pleased with my final exam mark. However, I know there are still lots of key areas that I need to still work on. In particular, I tend to just write as much information as I can about a certain topic and forget about what the question is actually asking for. I need to focus on explicitly writing exactly what they are asking for, otherwise the information I do write is irrelevant.

In terms of revision, to be more effective I focused on just studying the LAQs for the social cultural outcomes, which cut my revision time immensely. Another key way of revising that I believe really helped me was creating flashcards with the outcome on one side and the particular study on the other. This allowed me to study small areas as I tend to only need a few key words to remind me of what the outcome is about. I used the online software 'Quizlet', and downloaded it onto my phone so I could view the flashcards regularly. I also tested myself by only showing the outcome side and having to write the matching study. If I forgot a particular study, I used my textbook to read more about it and kept testing myself until it was ingrained into my memory.

As a whole, all the exams- not just psychology- were extremely tough, but I tried to do the best I could. After receiving all my exams back from my teachers, I am going to go over the areas that I did not do well on so that I can improve on those areas.