The pure sciences, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, are popular HSC subject choices among high performing students. There are a few reasons why this is the case. Chemistry is often a prerequisite for entry into medicine. Physics tends to pair well with mathematically inclined students. Biology allows students to demonstrate high-level critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and data analysis capabilities.

But the major reason why the sciences are so popular can be summed up in one word: scaling.

In the HSC, scaling refers to the process of adjusting marks for different subjects based on their difficulty, and is carried out to ensure that students’ final marks accurately reflect their level of achievement. Scaling is a bit like currency conversion: just as one US dollar and one Australian dollar aren’t worth the same, a mark of 90/100 in Physics and a mark of 90/100 in Mathematics Standard do not reflect identical student capabilities, and a fair comparison must be made between them. This is the job of the University Admissions Centre (UAC) prior to the calculation of ATARs.

Although it’s no secret that you can use scaling to your advantage, it’s important to emphasise that choosing the highest-scaling subjects doesn’t automatically entitle you to a good ATAR. You’ll need to beat the bulk of the bell curve in your performance to reap the rewards of scaling, and the larger the proportion of the cohort that chooses a certain subject, the harder it becomes to reach that threshold in it.

When it comes to taking advantage of scaling, one advantage I found with the pure sciences was that there are more objective, replicable ways to ensure you receive high marks in your exams. The more black-and-white the marking criteria, the more insulated you are from things outside your control, such as elements of subjectivity or open-ended questions. Furthermore, the relative abundance of questions that are less essay-like and focus on specific sub-topics reduces the impact of one question you encounter that you may be unprepared for, which in another subject may be worth as much as 20 marks.

You’re never really going to be able to stop yourself making a silly mistake or a calculation error here or there, and a lot of that depends on whether you are simply having a good or bad day. But overall, I found that I could go into my science exams with a great deal of confidence that I had the skills and knowledge prepared to identify how I would extract every single mark out of the exam paper, and end up on the right side of the scaling curve.

I’ve spent over a decade teaching the HSC sciences, most recently as Academic Director at a major Sydney tutoring centre and now as head teacher at my new offering, Dr Vasan Specialist Tuition. Let me take you through my three crucial strategies for ensuring success in your Preliminary and HSC science assessments.

1. Understand how and why you learn.

There is far too much rote learning being pushed in the HSC. It’s almost like we’ve forgotten what science really is – it’s not the memorisation of facts, verbatim definitions, data values and famous names. It’s a method for determining what’s true in our universe. It relies on agreeing on basic concepts like numbers and observations, and then slowly building on them to test new hypotheses and uncover further facts. If complicated science is completely reliant on basic science, why would it make any sense whatsoever to jump ahead without rigorously establishing these basics?

What I’ve observed in my 10+ years of teaching is how poorly the crucial groundwork is taught in virtually all schools and mainstream tuition centres. Many of these places expect you to understand the most complicated topics in the course by doing nothing more than mindlessly copying down notes from the whiteboard. I felt this as a student myself, and perhaps you’re experiencing the same thing yourself. To my mind, this is the absolute wrong approach. How can you summit the peak without first trekking up from base camp?

If you seek to effortlessly write full-mark responses to every question you encounter in the HSC exam, you need to go in with a knowledge pyramid. The foundation of your pyramid is the absolute basic principles. Things you take for granted, but are absolutely worth reminding yourself of from time to time. Positive and negative attract, vectors have directions, life-forms are comprised of cells.

Then you have to work yourself up to the higher-level concepts. When you learn and revise these concepts, you have to be able to rationalise them on the basis of the foundational concepts. If you can’t convince yourself that what you’re learning in the next layer of the pyramid is true based on the layer beneath it, then what you have is a gap in your pyramid, and everything layered on top of it will be unstable and prone to collapse.

Every block in your pyramid, no matter how high up, should be traceable down a path to a block in the base. The more complex the concept is you’re learning, the more work you need to do to find that path. But if you put that work in, that’s the true moment of discovery. That’s when you gain understanding. When an exam question pops up which is slightly atypical, you won’t crumble into a heap because the lines you memorised about the topic no longer fit.

If you’re trying to trace a pyramid path in your learning and you find a gap, focus on filling in that gap before you work your way up again. And when your teacher presents your first moment of discovery in this way, you can gain mastery and understanding very quickly. It really pays to have a teacher who gets this.

“There is no concept too difficult to understand – only those taught with disregard of the basic principles that underpin them.”

Equally important to structuring your learning is understanding how you learn. You know you’re ready for an exam when you don’t need to use much effort to draw upon the relevant facts and construct an answer to a question. The information is embedded in neural loops in your brain and its so-called ‘muscle memory’. For it to get there, those neural loops have to actually be used. You need to activate them, in as many ways as possible, to solidify that structural memory in your brain. This means completing practice questions, having verbal discussions with your teachers, reading for revision, investigating the topic on your own and even teaching others.

But all of that is useless without one all-important brain function.

Attention.

Attention refers to where your brain activity is directed at a given point in time. We have a major problem with attention in today’s society, with the advent of social media at our fingertips, and mass media consumption, it can be really hard to actually pay attention to something for more than a few minutes. (If you’re an avid TikTok consumer, you may even think a few minutes is too long...!) Without attention, those neural loops get improperly activated and don’t solidify. When you mindlessly read a textbook while flicking through your phone and dreaming about your evening plans, you may think you’re learning something, but you are very much wasting your time.

“If you’re not wholly immersed in the task at hand, you might as well not be doing it, because your brain is just going through the motions without making structural changes allowing you to gain knowledge.”

I’ve lost count of how many students I hear saying they study six to eight hours a day in Year 12. That is simply absurd. There is absolutely no way that even half of that time and effort is being used to actually effect learning, because a lot of that time is devoid of attention.

This is why at my tuition centre, I don’t put any focus on copying down notes or looking at screens. It is entirely an interaction between the teacher and the students. When you’re engaged in a genuine interaction, your attention is held, those neural loops critical for learning get reinforced, and you develop true interest.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you need to forget about everything else in your life and only pay attention to studying for science. I’m saying that you need to be in tune with your own attention. Study when you feel that your attention is at its peak, and when you start losing it, that’s your brain telling you it’s time to do something else. If you efficiently utilise your attentive hours, with 1-2 hours an evening (ramping up a bit more as you near an exam), you will gain a more solid grasp of the content than your peers. Plus, think of all that extra time you have during the day to enjoy life and reduce your stress levels, which makes you even more confident in your engagement with learning. This forms a positive feedback loop working in your favour throughout the year that’s simply irreplaceable.

Harnessing the power of attention, studying efficiently, and understanding how learning really works is the key to achieving your goals without burning out, which sadly affects many more people than you may think – many of them high achievers.

2. Balance content with exam technique.

The HSC is a 50-50 balance between knowing the content and knowing how to communicate the content under stressful exam conditions. The latter is what is known as exam technique. It’s incredibly important that you address both of these aspects with equal dedication.

The first part is knowing the content. Luckily, you have a syllabus to guide you here. You should have the relevant syllabus open next to you whenever you are studying or revising. Guide and plan your study based on the dot points, and whenever you’re reading material, ensure you know exactly which dot point is being addressed by learning it.

It also pays to have a bit of extra knowledge about the topics that goes beyond what’s strictly required by the syllabus. Think of it this way – if you were prepared to solve a complex polynomial going into your maths test, you’d be relieved and pleasantly surprised when they asked you to solve simple algebraic equations. You’d be able to answer the questions efficiently and effortlessly. If your knowledge of the syllabus extends beyond NESA’s requirements – in other words, there’s more above that layer in your knowledge pyramid we talked about earlier – then the exam will feel like a test of elementary knowledge.

If you want to master the perfect examination technique, it comes down to understanding how an examination is set and marked. Examination questions are set with certain outcomes in mind – high performing students are expected to meet particular criteria in their response, with lower performing students expected to hit lesser criteria. Exactly what those criteria are will depend significantly on the examiners for that year and their expectations when setting the paper. Two different examiners can set the same question, but may have slightly different marking criteria, as they each may weight various aspects of the response differently.

“Your main job when writing an answer to an exam question is to leave no room whatsoever for the marker to award you anything less than full marks.”

To do this, you need to become accustomed to predicting a range of marking criteria. For every extended response question worth two or more marks, before you start writing your answer, take a minute or so to jot down exactly how you think the marks could be allocated. Are they expecting a quoted theorem? Does the keyword say ‘evaluate’, indicating they want a definite final judgment? Is there a chemical equation, diagram or calculation that would support your response? Not only have you now identified where you are getting each mark from, you have also planned a structure to your answer. You may end up identifying a possible six marks’ worth of content for a four-mark question. Good. If you structure your answer to gain six marks, you will almost certainly hit any combination of a four-mark criteria designed for the question.

Do as many practice questions as you can. Once you’ve exhausted your school work and tutoring work, go through past papers, particularly those for which detailed marking criteria are available. The more questions you see, the easier you will find this process and the more successfully you will predict marking criteria.

Read the question extremely carefully. The keywords in the question (e.g. explain, discuss, evaluate) determine how you structure your response, the focus of the question determines what aspects of the syllabus you will use in your response, and the number of marks determines how many key points you will be making.

Structure your answers as if you are teaching the marker. Assume they only have a vague knowledge of the content and ensure that your response has a logical flow. If you get an opportunity to teach your peers or perhaps some lower grades in study sessions, do it. You’ll know straight away from the look on their faces if you are explaining logically or not, and any gaps in your knowledge will become glaringly obvious.

Don’t frustrate your marker and shoot yourself in the foot by writing your responses with incomplete sentences, poor grammar and poor handwriting. If you were thinking whether or not a response was worth five or six marks, and you were using a lot of effort to try and read part of the answer because of how illegible it is, you’d be tempted to give the response five out of six and move on. The HSC is a test of written communication skills – if you have shown you can’t communicate legibly or professionally, you probably don’t deserve full marks. Once you have written your answer, read it back to yourself. Does it sound like (and look like) it was written by a child, or is it the response of an effective communicator?

We take this approach very seriously at my tuition centre. I have designed our course material with careful consideration to the syllabus, reflecting the vast amount of practice questions I’ve encountered in my time as a teacher, and I have endeavoured to balance out the importance of learning the content with learning the questions.

3. Never be afraid to learn.

Perhaps the most important advice I can give you to succeed in not only the sciences, but in every aspect of your life, is to adopt an attitude of humility. Very intelligent people often don’t have a lot to say. Instead, they listen. And when they do speak, they often ask questions. Even when you think you understand a topic fully, never be afraid of being a student. I’ve been teaching the HSC sciences for over 10 years, and not one lesson has gone by where I haven’t learned something from my students. Each of the almost one thousand students I have taught have made me a better teacher in their own way, and I continue to learn from them.

The day you stop being a student is the day you stop growing as a person.

“My favourite phrase to say is “I don’t know”. Seriously, say it more often. It is incredibly liberating.”

It’s so tempting to always act like you know what’s going on, or to cover up an error by brushing it aside as trivial, out of fear of being judged or thought less of. But this isn’t the way to improve. If you delude yourself or pretend to others that you know the content when you really don’t, or if you lose marks in a question and tell yourself that it was the marker’s fault and you’ll get full marks next time, you won’t get any better.

The Greek philosopher Epictetus is quoted to have said: “It is impossible for one to learn what they think they already know”. I couldn’t agree more.

Utilise all the resources around you, your school teachers, your tutors, your friends and your family. You will be surprised how much you can learn from simply keeping an open mind and paying attention to discussions around you. The amount you can learn from mental osmosis, by simply “tuning in”, is staggering.

I readily tell my patients that I don’t know answers to some of their difficult questions. You may think that would reduce their confidence in me as a doctor, but it has the exact opposite effect because they see something they don’t often see in professionals – open communication, honesty, humility and shared decision making. Humans are hard-wired to detect honesty and authenticity on an unconscious level, and saying “I don’t know” shows that you’re a real human being whom they can trust.

I notice the same pattern when I teach and supervise junior doctors on the hospital wards. I tend to be most worried about those who don’t ask any questions and don’t participate freely in discussion. These are the doctors who tend to make mistakes and rash decisions that could have easily been avoided by asking for help. The junior doctor who asks simple questions is not only the one whom I can trust to practise safely and ethically – they’re also the one most likely to rapidly overtake the others in clinical competence.

If you want to master the sciences, then embrace both roles of being a student and a teacher. Never be afraid of saying “I don’t know”. In my classrooms, students are told to have no fear in raising their hand in front of their peers and saying that they don’t understand something. Chances are, there are a lot of others in the room relieved that you’ve asked the question.

Conclusion

So what can you do now to start succeeding in the sciences? The most important thing is to understand what is inside and outside your control. When you chase a result, whether it is an exam mark, an ATAR, or success in general, there are often many factors at play outside your control. Instead, chase excellence, which is entirely within your control.

“If the process is done right, the result will surely follow.”

You can control your rigour and breadth of study, your framework for understanding scientific concepts, and the depth with which you understand exam-style questions. You can control your attention, focus on absorbing yourself into the task at hand, and understand when you really need to be doing something else. And you can control the attitude with which you approach the sciences, your HSC, your further education and your career, by never being afraid to ask a question or admit you don’t know, and always having self-belief.

Let me leave you with my favourite quote from Epictetus, one which I live my life by and think about daily.

“It is not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.”