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

“Although I ranked 1st in several Calculus (mathematics) assessments towards the end of Year 11, I didn’t have the best start. As with most students’ experiences, Term 1 exams were much harder than expected; and due to not having found my learning style yet, I struggled to study efficiently and perform well on my exams. 

But midway through the year, something clicked!

And I am here to share what that discovery with you; that is, some of the best ways to study for BSSS Specialist Methods if you are an ATAR student in Canberra. 

Practice is, of course, necessary to solidify your understanding. But practicing without a plan is not enough to do well – even if you do thousands of questions (like I, unwittingly, did in Term 1 of Year 11). 

Finish School Textbook: First, you must cover all relevant chapters of the school textbook as this content will cover the basics of what will appear on your exam. And the earlier you can get through the school book, the better! For some topics such as Matrices and Statistics, the school book can actually be enough to get you through those parts of your exam.

Create Summary Sheet: While doing questions, make sure to keep a sheet of notes: not notes that regurgitate what’s written in the textbook, but notes summarising important formulae, tips and tricks you pick up along the way, and methods to approach each question type that will be assessed. The latter is especially useful for Calculus topics such as Differentiation and Integration, considering how there are various methods e.g. u-subsitution and integration by parts, which you can combine to solve more complex, unfamiliar questions.

Create Questionbank: It also helps to create a questionbank of problems you get wrong, which you would reattempt closer to exams. This will set you up for more efficient revision, preventing a last-minute scramble through your textbooks to figure out ‘that tricky question you couldn’t solve’. Personally, this was incredibly helpful for the Probability and Statistics unit as it was really easy to get questions incorrect – and the questionbank helped me keep note of the things I have to watch out for when solving tricky probability questions.

Once you have completed the school textbook, you can use the rest of your time leading up to exams to do extra practice and really challenge yourself. 

Study Efficiently: But don’t go overboard! From personal experience, you must balance your studies and resting in order to avoid burnout. That’s why you need to learn to study efficiently by e.g. not playing Netflix in the background.

2 hours of deep study is much more effective than 8 hours of unfocused study. This is important to understand early on in Year 11, as you will have workload from several other subjects to manage as well.

Set Goals For Each Study Session: This is why it’s also important to create a plan, so you know exactly what you are going to do before you start your study session. Set measurable and realistics goals: for example, to complete 4 pages of questions from Chapter 15: Infinite Series, and then to re-derive all the Sequences and Series formulae.

Question how every single thing works and why : When practicing with extra resources, ensure the content is relevant to the exam and that you are targetting your weak areas. Although it may initially feel uncomfortable, if you understand the fundamentals of every concept and the proof/logic behind every formula, you will be able to approach complex topics in Specialist Methods much more easily. For example, for Integration, you need to understand how the general rule for the area under a curve is derived before you can understand how to calculate volumes of revolution.”