Super Chem Wiz
New Member
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2015
- Messages
- 5
- Gender
- Male
- HSC
- 2013
I know there are other threads providing resources and advice, but I decided to create a thread of the resources that I used for HSC Chemistry, in which I obtained a HSC mark of 93.
1) Ahmad Shah Idil - revised, edited and perfected notes. (can be found in BOS resource section). They are the absolute BEST resource ever , but make sure you get the revised, edited and perfected version. The answers they provide to the syllabus dot points are fantastic. This is the MAIN resource I used and would refer back to everytime I learnt something at school.
2) Student's Guide to HSC Chemistry. Another awesome set of notes. I used this to complement the Ahmad Shah Revised notes. These are well written and are a great resource which is simple, and easy to understand. As the notes say, they are "The next best thing to cheating."
3) Past HSC papers and trial papers (I only looked at the CSSA and James Ruse trial papers). Make sure to especially take note of marking guidelines and some sample answers. I can't stress how important it is to study marking guidelines. Everyone seems to overlook this when studying HSC Chemistry, but it is very helpful, especially as HSC Chemistry marking can be quite strict. Starting to 'analyse' marking guidelines early on will save you the stress later on of finding you don't know what exactly you need to write to get all marks to a question. PM me if you need some past papers.
4) Notes from school to back up and re-affirm some of the dot-points. My teacher had good notes but sometimes they went into too much detail, and while the knowledge was nice to know, it wasn't directly relevant to the syllabus and wasn't going to help me in the HSC. Other times, my school notes were lacking in detail, so basically I just used my class notes to help expand on and clarify things that I felt weren't explained as well in Ahmad Shah Revised Notes and Student's Guide. PM me if you want my class notes that my teacher taught us with.
5) Conquering Chemistry Worksheets. These i felt had great questions and helped re-affirm my knowledge of the course during the year. This is definitely a good resource to use throughout the year. Has some good calculation questions, and pracs are included as well, with methods for most of them. Again, feel free to PM me for these.
6) Conquering Chemistry / Jacaranda Textbook. These textbooks had some pretty decent information when I needed a valid source to clarify some things. I didn't do any of the questions from either textbook, I only used them for information. The questions in the Conquering Chemistry Textbook are sometimes not helpful and are more difficult than the level of the HSC, hence why I didn't use it for questions.
This is what I used for my HSC and without them I definitely wouldn't have achieved a band 6 in Chemistry (Obviously you can achieve a band 6 without these notes, but I personally wouldn't have been able to do it). However, just having these resources doesn't mean you will get a band 6, you must study hard and use them consistently throughout the year.
1) Ahmad Shah Idil - revised, edited and perfected notes. (can be found in BOS resource section). They are the absolute BEST resource ever , but make sure you get the revised, edited and perfected version. The answers they provide to the syllabus dot points are fantastic. This is the MAIN resource I used and would refer back to everytime I learnt something at school.
2) Student's Guide to HSC Chemistry. Another awesome set of notes. I used this to complement the Ahmad Shah Revised notes. These are well written and are a great resource which is simple, and easy to understand. As the notes say, they are "The next best thing to cheating."
3) Past HSC papers and trial papers (I only looked at the CSSA and James Ruse trial papers). Make sure to especially take note of marking guidelines and some sample answers. I can't stress how important it is to study marking guidelines. Everyone seems to overlook this when studying HSC Chemistry, but it is very helpful, especially as HSC Chemistry marking can be quite strict. Starting to 'analyse' marking guidelines early on will save you the stress later on of finding you don't know what exactly you need to write to get all marks to a question. PM me if you need some past papers.
4) Notes from school to back up and re-affirm some of the dot-points. My teacher had good notes but sometimes they went into too much detail, and while the knowledge was nice to know, it wasn't directly relevant to the syllabus and wasn't going to help me in the HSC. Other times, my school notes were lacking in detail, so basically I just used my class notes to help expand on and clarify things that I felt weren't explained as well in Ahmad Shah Revised Notes and Student's Guide. PM me if you want my class notes that my teacher taught us with.
5) Conquering Chemistry Worksheets. These i felt had great questions and helped re-affirm my knowledge of the course during the year. This is definitely a good resource to use throughout the year. Has some good calculation questions, and pracs are included as well, with methods for most of them. Again, feel free to PM me for these.
6) Conquering Chemistry / Jacaranda Textbook. These textbooks had some pretty decent information when I needed a valid source to clarify some things. I didn't do any of the questions from either textbook, I only used them for information. The questions in the Conquering Chemistry Textbook are sometimes not helpful and are more difficult than the level of the HSC, hence why I didn't use it for questions.
This is what I used for my HSC and without them I definitely wouldn't have achieved a band 6 in Chemistry (Obviously you can achieve a band 6 without these notes, but I personally wouldn't have been able to do it). However, just having these resources doesn't mean you will get a band 6, you must study hard and use them consistently throughout the year.
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