Maximising your grades is on the minds of every year 11 and 12 across Australia.
What is it that is going to give your grades that extra edge when it comes to crunch time?
This video by our director and qualified teacher, Jessica Evergreen, will give you the tools you need to start maximising your grades today.
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Maximising your grades
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Study tips
English creative text response
Year 12 methods study resources
If you would like to contact us about maximising your grades you can reach us on 0409 083 909.
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Video transcript
Hi, my name is Jessica. I’m the director of Evergreen Tutoring Services, and I’m going to have a quick chat with you today about how you can maximize your grades. This video is applicable to all year levels. But mostly, what we’re going to focus on here is year 11 and 12.
The most common goal we see with students is that they want to maximise their grades. Now, there might be a couple of different ways they aim at achieving that; but the overall goal remains the same. So we’re going to cover a couple of different ways that you can use some of these tips here to maximize your grades.
The first tip is to break your study up.
Now, it’s important to break your study up for a couple of reasons. The first one is burnout. You’ve all heard about burnout, and it’s a very real thing for year 12.
Lots of students experience it. And this happens because of high stress levels and extreme workloads. So breaking your study up into manageable parts is a huge key here, to not only improving your grades but preventing burnout while you do it. Now the important thing here is don’t break your study up into small parts four weeks before the exam. You need to start sooner than that. You should be breaking your study at the beginning of your 12. But if you’re not yet, start now, don’t wait for your exams. Don’t wait for an upcoming SAC. You should be going over topics, small amounts of questions and revising every day.
Now, I know some of you are like, what?! I have five subjects, and all of them have homework!! And on top of that, you want me to find extra time to do this study?!
The answer is yes.
It’s just one of those things where if you spend 15 to 20 minutes a day on each of these topics, you will not only find it easier in class, you won’t be so stressed with SACs and outcomes, and You will do better on your exams. As a whole, you’ll feel like you understand what is going on with your subjects.
Study in small bursts
Now to break this study up, what you should ideally do here is aim for, 15 to 20 minutes blocks, but definitely no more than 90-minute chunks. Unless you’re doing some one on one time with somebody who can make sure you’re using that time efficiently.
Now, there’s a lot of studies to show that when we’re just by ourselves, 90 minutes is the amount of time we can focus before we need a break.
The important thing here is to work hard for that 90 minutes, put your phone away, and don’t look at it. If you are tempted to put it in a different room, don’t have the TV on, don’t study with music that has lyrics. All of these things cause distractions, especially when you’re trying to study in a way that helps you to remember what you’re doing. Which is, after all, the goal.
Now we have a couple of other articles you can check out on our website, and I’ll put the link down below. But basically, what they are is a list of study tips and a couple of different articles and resources for things that are more subject-specific.
So this video covers a broad range for all of year 12. But if you’re looking for perhaps methods or English and you want more in-depth information on that, have a look at the links or browse through our website, and you will find some more resources there that can help you improve your study time.
The next thing is to revise often.
As we said before, we should break our study up. But the next one is often. It’s not enough to study once a week, for 20 minutes. It’s just not enough. You got to remember that even though you may be at the top of your class in your school, you’re competing against all of Australia. So you’ve got to be competing against those other students at other schools with other resources, everybody wants to do very well, and you are competing against them too.
The way to do that effectively is to make sure you’re revising the right things often.
So studying for 10 to 20 minutes a night on your subjects is all you need to get a good baseline for your study.
The third thing is to study while you’re warm.
There are many studies here, done by universities in various places, that show that when you’re warm, you are more productive. When they did these studies on people who are working, they found that when the temperature was 20 degrees, 44% more mistakes were made than if the temperature was 25 degrees.
What this means is you are more productive in warmer temperatures. It is important to note that once the temperature gets over 28 or 29 that productivity goes down. We’re saying here that you don’t have to crank the heater up but just make sure you’re warm. Put a jumper on or sit with a blanket in your lap. Make sure you’re warm.
Comfort is an important thing for maximising your grades.
So when you put all of these things together, what you find is you’re starting to build the basic study skills that you need to begin maximizing your grades.
Now, there are a lot more steps here, and we’ll cover up more videos about that in the future. But mostly, what we want to focus on is studying the right content in small bursts. Now, if you don’t know what to study, that’s okay. Sometimes it’s confusing. There’s a lot of topics that happen really quickly, and you move on in class, sometimes before you even know what’s going on.
So we’ve got a couple of resources on our website that you can have a look at. They’ve got all of the topics listed. If you sign up for our course, you can watch those videos. But even if you don’t sign up for our course, you can look at the topics, which gives you a pretty good guideline of what you should be studying. So go have a look at those topics and go and study them yourself. You’ll find them in your textbooks, or you can just subscribe, and you can use the resources, practice questions and videos that we’ve got there.
But definitely look at that and use it to help inform what you should be studying to prepare for your exam stacks and outcomes. The next thing is to study often, don’t just do it once, it won’t be enough, it’s the hard truth.
So study often 15 to 20 minutes a night for each subject, at least.
And the other thing is to be warm. Now we know that warmth increases your productivity, and there might be a couple of things that you find the work specifically for you.
So what we’re talking about here is not just warmth, but in particular, finding what increases your productivity. So you might find that sitting by a window with lots of natural light improves your productivity or that including a couple of plants within your study space is also good for productivity. These things can help to just relax you a little bit.
Now all of these things are not only productive and conducive to study, but they help you absorb what you’re studying. So if you’re spending hours and hours, in huge blocks, focusing on a topic you don’t really understand, to begin with, all you’re going to do is frustrate yourself. And the last thing we want is for you to be frustrated. Year 12 is hard enough without you being stuck. Alright, so make sure you follow these things, and the final thing is to get help.
Get help maximising your grades
This might be from your teachers, this might be from your peers, it could be from your older siblings, parents, tutor, whoever it is, don’t stay stuck.
There’s lots of help out there for you.
You could probably even find YouTube videos or online courses that explain each of the topics in depth. We have one on our page. The thing is that there are so many great resources out there that there isn’t a need for you to be feeling stuck. Find somebody, a study buddy, that you can work with, somebody who can go questions through when you’re stuck on a question.
Now that we’ve covered those four things, I’m going to leave you with it.
Just one last thing, if you’re one of those people who are stuck on what to study, or you’re really confused about what kinds of topics you should be focusing on, contact us or jump onto one of our short courses to maximize your grades.
That’s all for today on maximising your grades.
Thank you and good luck.