The Most Personalised BSSS Maths Methods Tuition, Designed For You.

“When I was in Year 11, I ranked 1st in my Calculus exams towards the end of Year 11. But let me tell you, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. In fact, at the start of the year, the Term 1 exams hit me harder than expected. I just couldn’t seem to get into my groove and figure out how to study effectively. And as a result, my performance on those exams had suffered.

But midway through the year, something clicked!

I found myself ranking high in my exams and having a much better grasp on the course material. So if you want to improve your grades for Maths Methods, these tips might just be what you need.

Let me preface by saying: doing thousands of practice questions without a plan won’t guarantee success – trust me, I learned that the hard way in Term 1.

Also, to clarify, although I had personally completed Specialist Methods, the same topics are covered in both subjects in Canberra; with Specialist Methods only diving deeper into them and presenting harder questions in its exams. 

Finish School Textbook: When preparing for an exam, it’s important to have a solid understanding of the basics i.e. complete your school textbook!! It may seem tedious, but trust me when I say that covering all relevant chapters in your book will lay the foundation for your success. And the faster you get through it, the more time you’ll have to focus on extra practice. However, for topics like Statistics, the content in your school textbook is more than enough to get you through those parts of your exam.

Create Summary Sheet:  When working through questions, it’s important to take notes… but not just any old notes. These notes should summarise key formulas, share useful tips and tricks that you identify along the way, and outline different approaches for tackling each type of exam question. This is especially crucial for Calculus topics like Differentiation, where there are multiple methods (such as the Chain Rule using composite functions VS using d/dx) that can be combined to solve tricky problems. You will be thanking yourself for taking these notes come revision time!

Create Questionbank: In my experience, this is one of the best ways to consolidate questions you get wrong. In this strategy, you highlight any questions you get wrong in your first round of practice; such that, in your second round of practice, all you would be doing is reattempting questions you initially got wrong combined with particularly difficult questions you found in your first round. This was extremely helpful for Trigonometry as those application questions can get quite complex!

Study Efficiently: Burnout is going to be your worst enemy. It’s different for everyone, but I found keeping a consistent exercise routine helped me balance my studies with my health and enjoyment. Of course, you don’t have to hit the gym – you can go for a walk or hang out with friends! Make time for what you love by studying efficiently.

Set Goals For Each Study Session:  Not having measurable and realistic goals for each exam study session is like preparing for a marathon without having a targeted exercise routine in place. You will either get burnt out or you won’t be prepared enough. That’s why you need to identify all the tasks you need to complete and spread them out throughout the week to make the workload manageable. For example, for one day, you could choose to complete 10 pages of questions from Chapter 12: Optimisation in Maths Methods, and then create separate methods to approach time optimisation VS volume optimisation questions.

Question how every single thing works and why : 

Before completing thousands of questions, ask yourself: could I explain this concept to a 5 year old? It’s an old method, I know, but it really tests if you know your fundamentals. Ultimately, the hardest questions will always rely on adapting your fundamental knowledge i.e. you would not have learned a set formula to solve it. That’s why I like to go back and derive every single formula I’m using and learn the logic behind every step of every method they teach us at school.”