charl

charmingcloud Hi there, what you’re going through sounds really terrible, respect+ for getting help, you’ll get through this! BTW taking lots of Panadol at once even when you think it manages anxiety attacks and doesn’t count as self harm can be deadly because it can cause liver and kidney failure. Have you considered taking an entire year off? It sounds like you can use an intermission/leave of absence, I can’t stress how good it is for mental health from my own experience (I took 2 myself)

Also, when I was dealing with some depression and anxiety myself, I found out that zinc seemed to really help with those. Anecdotally I was taking zinc to manage allergies during pollen season when I found out it somehow made those mental health problems go away as well. Of course I’m not a doctor and if your doctor prescribed something that can’t be taken with zinc then don’t take it

bunny077 firstly, i would discourage you from studying too much during the holidays, while it can seem like a good idea initially, it’s just a one way ticket to burning out halfway through the year. and while year 12 goes by quickly, the chore of studying and revising really takes its toll and can make each day feel like a chore. so just relax, enjoy your free time without the looming threat of exams and atars, and have fun!

as for overall advice, the best way to revise for exams is to do past exams, and it is never too early to start them, even if it means skipping questions here and there. i personally didn’t do that in year 12 (but i did when i accelerated biology and found it really helpful), but i would say by the end of term 3 you should have started doing past exams. learning how to answer exam style questions is just as important as understanding the content. for biology, for example, there is such a specific marking scheme that you need to adhere to in order to get full marks and the only way to figure out how they want questions to be answered is by doing past exams and marking them. and by marking them, don’t just give yourself a mark or no mark and call it a day. you really gotta understand WHY you didn’t get the mark, and what you need to include in the future to get it.

for subject specific advice:
english: i did englang, but the principle is basically the same. i personally hate writing essays, and i have a short attention span and i am a procrastinator. so rather than attempting full practice essays, I would write practice paragraphs instead. i’ll admit that i should’ve done this more frequently as a form of revision, but i am incredibly lazy and left it way too late. you might find that writing one practice paragraph a week is much more achievable than trying to do full essays.

general: for sacs, do the textbook questions and ask for practice sacs. unfortunately exam style questions and sac style questions are very different in general, so i personally focused only on sac practices up until my last sac, which is when i switched to doing practice exams. my teacher told me to do 10 practice exams for each exam (so 20 in total), and this definitely helped me achieve my 40ss. also make your bound reference as you go and ask your teacher if it’s valid. i saw many students who had their references confiscated during trial exams (thank god not real exams) because they did not fit the guidelines. i’m a chronic procrastinator, so after i completed each chapter in the textbook, i would add the information to my reference straight away so that i didn’t have a build up of information to put in, which would seem too daunting and make me avoid doing it.

methods: on the contrary, i did no practice exams for methods and i wrote up my bound reference like a couple days before my exam. i hated methods. the only advice i can give you is don’t be me. i didn’t pay attention in class, i “studied” for sacs the night before, and i took a nap in the middle of my methods exam 1. don’t do that

chemistry: similarly to biology, chemistry is a content subject with a very specific marking scheme, so practice exams are a must. in terms of general revision, MINDMAPS! MINDMAPS! MINDMAPS! they’re pretty, and effective, and a good way to get all of the information out. i personally made one A4 mindmap for each topic in chemistry, (this limits your space so that you’re forced to only include the important information and not the useless stuff), and while doing my first practice questions i would refer to these mindmaps if i didn’t know the answer. eventually i was able to memorise most of the information and stopped referring to them while doing past exams.

i know that everyone always says “your ATAR doesn’t matter, there’s always another way to get to where you wanna go” and that is absolutely true, VCE is only a small part of your life and is definitely not something to kick yourself over if it doesn’t go well. however, coming from someone who thrives off academic validation, wanting to do well is just as valid. you say you have little motivation, but the fact that you are seeking advice to do better just proves that there is some motivation in there. all you gotta do is picture your end goal, and do your best to get as close to it as you can. good luck! i have no doubt that you’ll be perfectly fine <3 remember to work hard, but also have fun.

charl mate, your notes are literally A GEM!!! Every concept is literally explained so well, so thank you again
OUTSTANDING WORK!!!

Hey ATARnoters. This is just going to be a small bloggish thing I do in my free times cause why not. A quick intro into me. My subjects this year (2024) are

• 1/2 Chem
• 1/2 Methods
• 1/2 History
• 1/2 Bio
• Other various Year 10 classes

I’m sorta excited to do them but also it’s abit freaky! I’m more than happy to answer any questions or anything of that sort!

POST 1 - 19/12/2023

hi! my name is dani, and to be honest, i never thought of starting a vce journal. i’ve read countless amounts on atar notes, and i was like ‘eh that could never be me.’ but i really wanted to capture my vce journey, because i know it is going to be an extraordinarily bumpy road that i’m not sure i’m quite ready to ride. i’m in year 12, the class of 2024, and i wanted to just document the ups and downs of the year (maybe more downs that ups but that’s ok).

my subjects
well i’m doing five subjects next year; four at my in-person school and one through virtual school victoria. at my in-person school, i’m studying english (compulsory, although i would have enjoyed doing english language), general maths, business management, and psychology. through virtual school victoria, i’m studying extended investigation (explanation below).

english — i love english. i don’t care what people say about hating english and wanting to die when they go to english class, i absolutely enjoy english (despite my friends correlation between me loving english and being white ). when i finish high school, i want to study media + communications and creative writing at unimelb. kind of ironic how english is my lowest performing subject (mid 70’s to low 80’s on a good day), but i don’t like analysing books, and why the author chose medea to be a child-killer (yes our school chose medea for year 11 it was incredibly boring). i enjoy the creative component of english, which is why i am SUPER grateful for the new english study design where we get to craft our own creative responses, because i always do super well on those in my english sac’s. enough about english…

general math — i was planning on dropping general in year 12, because it was too easy, but then i realised “why drop it because it’s easy… it is just an opportunity to get a decent study score.” (for background information, i was going to drop this to continue with geography but not enough people from 1/2 wanted to do it so it got cancelled. then i had to chose between biology and general, and i really really despise biology [a story in itself, i might write about it later] so i chose general). i did well this year, i heard the 3/4 course is almost a copy and paste of units 1/2, so that will be interesting.

business management — HELP i will never understand how people tend to do so bad in this subject. i never dropped below a 90 on my sac’s (except the one time i realised that my teacher marked me an extra mark that when removed, it would’ve been an 87, so i didn’t tell her because what’s loyalty T-T). i feel that business is the kind of subject that where you put the effort in, you get the reward, and i do all the notes and the textbook questions assigned but i never really went out of my way to study, and still managed 90’s-100’s. definitely will change that approach next year because i’ll get lazy if i don’t. but i DO have the same teacher next year as i did this year, which is thrilling because she is great, but changed her teaching style during orientation where peoples tests grades dropped for the worse because it sucked (thank god i’m an independent learner ESPECIALLY for business).

psychology — psych has always been the stand out science for me. i feel like studying why people do what they do and how the mind works entails so many fascinating connections to what i already know, and to branch off that is just something i enjoy. i did great this year in psychology with my decent 75 year old teacher, and then she went on leave and i got an even better teacher who was by far more engaging than her.

extended investigation — as mentioned, i’m doing this through vsv, and took a LOT of convincing for my school to let me do it (gotta love having a kick-ass mum). i’m really excited, because not only isn’t there an exam, i get to look into stuff i really enjoy and it’s mostly self paced meaning i can do it in my own time… AND IT SCALES DECENTLY TOO!! basically EI as it is abbreviated is a subject where you write a thesis on a topic you have researched for the whole year, and then present it as an oral presentation to a panel of VCAA assessors. helps build critical thinking, but i want to improve my writing skills.

why i despise biology
biology this year was such a roller coaster, because i had the worst teacher imaginable. like if he had to teach to survive, he’d be a pile of ashes right now. i did incredibly bad in his class, because i had no idea what i was doing 95% of the time, and he has this mindset where he thought he was always right, despite marking our unit 1 exams wrong and screwing up multiple other marking on sac’s. BUT HE LEFT AFTER SEMESTER 1, and i got a biology teacher who has a PhD in something (finished on an A, which is like 25% more than what i finished on with the bad teacher)

goals
i guess i should also talk about my goals for the year. study score wise, i am hoping to achieve:

• english — 30-35
• general — nothing below a 40
• business management — nothing below a 45
• psychology — 35-40
• extended investigation — 35-40

after school, i am DEFINITELY taking a gap year because school is exhausting me, before i study media + communications and creative writing at unimelb (need an 88 atar i think that it’s achievable).

a little bit more about me…
i love to talk, if you couldn’t tell by this massive first post. i don’t know, i’ve always just been so opinionated and love to talk about almost anything.

• i love music, it is literally what keeps my heart beating healthy. i listen to varying genres, but i listen to conan gray (top 0.001% of listeners this year with him being over 1/3 of my overall streams), taylor swift (who i didn’t get tickets to because of bots and fake fans), enhypen, paramore, sabrina carpenter, gracie abrams, newjeans, mcr, etc etc
• concerts are something else i really enjoy, despite being to only two. i saw conan gray in 2022 which was MAGNIFICENT and then paramore (opening night) in november 2023. my goal is to definitely go to more concerts after year 12, because live music >>
• i also love reading, and have literally bought 55 books in 18 months. i was banned from buying books for my birthday (my parents still bought me 2 lol) and for christmas (i’m getting 6 haha). i just love living vicariously through other people in made up worlds… maybe it’s a bad coping habit but oh well.

i’m always up for music and book suggestions, as i am always running low on either, and there is only so many times i can listen to taylor swifts catalogue of music over and over. apologies for the lengthy introduction but i love to talk and that will never change. bye for now!

haps

Highest subject score is DUX

Obviously in schools teachers are never going to be fully impartial and objective so there would be a bunch of reasons outside of actually who is better at vce french as to why someone else was awarded "dux". Subject score is actually objective.

You may have not got the award of "dux" but you duxxed the subject so it's fine imo

EDIT: probably would be more embarrassing to say DUX if you just got the teachers award and not the actual highest score