95+ ATAR Prelim Tips

Your prelim exams are right around the corner…and you’re stressed out.

What should I be doing to succeed?

How many papers should I do?

How can I guarantee my success?

These are most likely the questions that you are asking yourself a lot.

But don’t worry, because today I will share with you my top 95+ ATAR tips to making sure that you DESTROY your preliminary exams and finish off year 11 feeling great.

Let’s begin!

🥇 Tip 1: Prioritise

One of the biggest mistakes that students make when it comes to studying for their prelim exams is that they revise every topic from start to finish.

Topic 1 → topic 2 → topic 3→ … → End of content.

On the surface, this looks fine right?

It’s not.

When you revise each topic from beginning to end, you’re wasting your time.

This is because not all topics are equal to you, and therefore, you should not be treating all topics equally.

Some topics, you’re confident in.

Other topics, you could not remember for the life of you.

So how does it make sense to revise all topics in order? It DOESN’T!

What you should be doing is prioritising each topic based off of how you’re feeling with that topic.

ACTION STEP:

1. List out all topics that will be in your prelim exams

2. Highlight each topic using 1 of 3 colours:

   • GREEN → ‘I know this and I am confident!’

   • ORANGE → ‘I kind of know it. I just need to refresh my memory on it’

   • RED → ‘I have no idea what this is or I can’t remember it’

3. Revise your topics in the order of RED → ORANGE → GREEN.

By doing the above steps, you’ll be maximising your time through revising the content that you actually need to revise.

📆 Tip 2: Create a Plan

How can you expect to do well in your final exams if you have no plan?

It’s like fighting a war that you’ve not prepared for…

It’s like running into a forest with a blindfold on…

You get the point.

Create a study plan that you’re going to follow from NOW till the END of your prelim exams.

How do you actually create this plan?

It’s not by writing out your exact routine every day and how much you’ll be studying for each subject.

It’s simply by writing down the tasks that you’re going to be completing every single day till the prelim exams.

It’s that simple!

For example, your plan could look like:

• Monday 26th of August

  • Revise red topic in module 1 of biology and turn it to green

  • Do practice questions on functions for maths

  • Revise red topic in module 1 of chemistry and turn to green

• Tuesday 27th of August

  • Task 1

  • Task 2

You get the point.

If you’re confused on what subjects you should be doing and when, just follow these guidelines

1. MAX 3 subjects per day — the more subjects you add to your day, the more scattered your focus is and hence the less work you get done.

2. Do targeted maths practice questions for 5 days per week!

3. Visit each subject at least once every 3 days — for example, if you study biology today, make sure you study it again within the next 3 days

4. Spend the most time on the subjects that you’re doing the worse in and those that you’re the least confident in!

📃 Tip 3: Do Past Paper Exams!!!

Another HUUUUGEEEE mistake that I see students doing when they are preparing for their prelim exams, is that they spend all their time taking and reading notes!

THIS IS SO INEFFECTIVE AND INEFFICIENT!

Remember, you’re preparing for an exam…not a reading and writing competition.

Make sure you give yourself at least 2 weeks to do a lot of practice papers.

Yes, I know you might still have content to finish, and that’s completely fine. Make sure you do practice questions on the content that you’ve already done WHILE you finish off the new content. Then, after you’ve finished off all the content, you can do practice questions on everything!

Not only should you be spamming as many past papers as possible, but you need to make sure you’re doing the past papers effectively.

You can’t get away with just spamming questions yet not doing them properly.

🧘‍♂️ Tip 4: Relax & Give it your best

Right now, you might be thinking that these prelims are the be all and end all…but let me tell you something very important:

These prelims have NO correlation to your final ATAR. Even if you were to hypothetically fail your exams…you’d still be able to achieve a 95+.

HOWEVER,

This obviously doesn’t mean that you should be relaxed and careless. No, not at all.

What this does mean though is that you should not be so fearful.

Put in your absolute best and do everything you can to succeed, but don’t be overly stressed about it because that can literally hinder your success in year 12.

When I was in year 11, I remember so many students who were super focused and dedicated.

They were at the library every single day, they were grinding hard and they were all aiming for high ATARs.

But what happened after year 11?

They burnt out.

They fall off…hard.

Their goal ATAR went from 99 to 80. No joke.

Why did this happen?

Because they were all super short-term focused. They were exerting all their efforts into year 11 and they completely forgot about year 12.

What did I do?

I also focused in year 11 and I did exert all my efforts…but I HAD YEAR 12 in the back of my mind.

I kept reminding myself that the real war is year 12, not year 11.

🤔 Tip 5: Analyse Previous Exams

If you’ve done any other exams throughout year 11, don’t just ignore them.

Make sure you analyse all your previous exams and extract these key things:

1. Mistakes that you made in the exam

2. Lessons you’ve learned

3. What you need to improve on.

By doing this, you’ll be able to actually improve and not fall into the same issues.

I hope this post has helped you out and I wish you the best of luck.

If you want to make sure you’re doing everything right for these upcoming exams and want to guarantee your success through 97+ ATAR guidance and mentorship, be sure to book a free discovery call with me as I might be able to help you 🙂 

See you next week,

Luqman (your ATAR mentor)