HOW TO WORK COLLABORATIVELY AS A YEAR BEFORE THE HSC, TOGETHER AS A COHORT

Stop thinking to yourself “I made these notes myself and others don’t deserve them.” No. Please. No. Those days are over. The trials are over. You no longer are competing with your grade. You can't do much about your internal marks anymore except to try to boost your grade's overall marks in order to improve everyone’s internal marks. That is, the higher the entire grade gets in the HSC, the higher every person’s internal marks will be.

Facebook/One Drive – Sharing Information

Using an online cloud or creating a Facebook group is a great way to share notes, documents and little tips about the HSC with your cohort. Don’t be afraid to share your own stuff first too, as others may be less willing to if no one has done it.

Tutoring/Helping Your Friends Can Help You Learn Better Too

By tutoring and trying to solve or explain problems to your friends, you are not only helping them but you are also unintentionally improving your own understanding of things because you are forced to explain them. So next time, don’t feel like you’re wasting your time if you are spending it all on helping others, because you are also strengthening your own understandings as well.

Group Study Sessions

Studying together in groups can force you to be better motivated and pushed knowing your friends are studying at the same time. Your friends can help you clarify topics you don’t understand or tell you about things you may have missed in class.

Additionally, for topics such as maths, others may have great questions you have not seen before. Furthermore, many of your friends can work on one question at the same time and you’ll be able to learn and find a solution much faster than trying to solve it by yourself only.

You can also break up the work that has to be done as well when working as a group and save even more time. For example, one person in a group can look for past papers while another can look for additional notes instead. Thus, with the same amount of time, you’ll have much more information and helpful notes to work with compared to doing everything by yourself.

Studying in groups can however lead to procrastination and endless talking about something else, so it’s best to be serious about studying when your group meets up and to meet somewhere suitable as well (e.g. the library).

Jack Zheng | N° 54