How to prepare for the HSC English Exams?

Often, students are confused on whether there is any extra work to do for the HSC English Exams once trials are done. After all, the content is the same, right? However, the biggest trap to fall into after completing your trials is to be complacent and fall into the post-trial slump. Remember that the HSC exams is 50% of your final mark so it can make or break it.

Recall the preparation we had to do for HSC English trial exams (see blog post here), you will need to do the same for your HSC exams. The trial exams are meant to be a test run for your final HSC exam. Therefore, you should use your trial exams as a reflecting point on how you can improve for the actual HSC exams. Some things students may have struggled with are: running out of time for short answer papers, or not adapting your essays to the exam question well enough in Common Module, Mod A and Mod B, or failing to prepare a particular text type for Mod C. Time management is one of the biggest pitfalls under exam conditions and if that applies to you, you should be doing as many past papers as possible. At JP English for Term 3 weekly group lessons, we provide students with 6 full length mock trial papers so you can fine tune your exam technique. Additionally, we’ve got a separate HSC mock exam program (details are here) which provides video lessons by state rankers to dissect what exactly you need to include for each module, along with 2 full length mock papers that get marked by our high achieving team. 

Between your trials and HSC, your pre-prepared essays should be improved too according to your school’s feedback. Furthermore, a nuance that many students and tutors don’t realise is that often times, there are differences between writing style preferences between specific schools and the external HSC marker. As our tutors have scored highly in the final HSC exams, we are familiar with writing styles that work well in the HSC. Of course, our tutors tailor their teaching according to our students’ teacher’s preferences for internal school assessments, but once trials are over, we will guide students to writing in a way that will score highly in the external HSC exams.

Additionally, if your prescribed texts involve a suite of poetry or short stories in Common Module or Mod A, there is a small but potential chance for the exam question to specify a particular poem or short story.  Therefore, you would ideally prepare a body paragraph for each of the poems or short stories. There  is a greater chance of a specific poem being specified for Module B since it is a critical study of literature, so this tip is especially important for Module B.

Therefore, it is important to optimise your preparation after your trials and not slack off. Best of luck for your upcoming exams!