Thousands of Victorian students gear up for VCE exams
English exams this morning will kick off a five-week exam period for thousands of VCE students across the state. Here are six ways to get the most out of last minute study.
Advice
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Thousands of Victorian students will today put pen to paper for their first VCE exam.
Beginning with the English and English as an additional language exams, the five-week exam period will be held in 522 exam centres across Victoria.
Maribyrnong Sports Academy year 12 student and 2020 Olympic Games hopeful Reba Stewart, 18, will join 82,694 other VCE students expected to sit their exams over the coming weeks.
The taekwondo enthusiast said she had travelled the world for the sport during year 12 but felt behind academically when she returned.
“I won a medal at the Dutch Open, which qualified me to join the Australian team and go to the world championship in Manchester in May,” Ms Stewart said.
“When I got back I had to spend a lot of time trying to catch up on studying and doing the SACs (school assessed coursework) I missed.
“I’m lucky my school was supportive, though.”
Director of Sport at Maribyrnong Sports Academy Mark McAllion said there were wellbeing staff available at the school to assist if students felt overwhelmed with achieving a high ATAR and achieving sporting goals.
“The role of wellbeing staff is to identify any mental health challenges amongst students in VCE, provide support for students and refer them on to more professional counselling if required, as well,” Mr McAllion said.
o students, but Ms Stewart said there should be more flexibility for students to pursue other interests aside from studying during VCE.
“I think VCE can limit people’s interests, but it is still important to maintain other commitments,” Ms Stewart said.
Ms Stewart said the VCE process had caused her and her classmates significant stress over the past year and she believed the system should be changed.
“VCE is 100 per cent stressful and in my opinion I don’t like the way VCE is set out throughout the year,” Ms Stewart said.
HOW TO HAND STRESS OF VCE EXAMS
MINIMISE DISTRACTIONS
Focus your attention by minimising the distractions in your environment. This includes mobile phones, social media and television.
USE ACTIVE TESTING OR RECALL
Doing quizzes or forcing yourself to recall information is linked to deeper memory formation than when you passively review notes.
SPREAD OUT LEARNING
The benefits of spacing out learning have been observed in students from preschool to university
MIX THINGS UP
Mixing up the practise of interrelated skills, rather than learning them sequentially in a block, can boost performance in the long run.
COMBINE SPOKEN WORD & IMAGES
While multi-tasking is detrimental to learning, research has found that processing images and spoken words simultaneously has no negative effect on how well we remember them.
USE STORIES
How well you remember an abstract concept can be improved by concrete examples or stories.