The HSC biology exams can be stressful and even overwhelming for students, especially since there are so many different subjects to learn and study.
To ease exam season in your final year, seek out the assistance of a tutor.
Tutors often have lots of tutees to assist, so they have a limited amount of time to spend with you per session. Making that half-hour or hour count is critical!
When to Seek a Private Tutor
No doubt, your daily schedule is already pretty busy, so you might not want to enlist the assistance of a tutor if you don’t need to.
However, if you do have the ability, it’s never a bad idea to start meeting with a tutor to ensure that you can keep pace with all of your lessons and courses.
HSC biology is a highly complex subject. There is absolutely no shame in seeking out a tutor for this, or any subject! That’s why tutors exist!
If you are strapped for spare time, here are some signs that indicate you might want to clear some space in your week for a tutor.
You Have a Hard Time Remembering Lessons
If you find yourself constantly forgetting the key terms and concepts from class even if you take notes, it may be best to reinforce that knowledge in your head with some outside help.
You Don’t Know How to Take Effective Notes
Taking good notes in class is crucial. Especially in a subject like HSC biology, you’ll need to have clear, legible notes to look back on for studying. A tutor can help you learn to take notes effectively as well as how to use them to study well.
You Feel Like You Are Struggling
Whether you’re managing well during your biology lessons or not, if you feel like you’re constantly one step behind, you can use some assistance to feel confident in your biology course. You might just need a little boost to take you from floundering to thriving.
You Find Exams Difficult
Taking exams is undoubtedly a skill on its own. Many students who are sincerely knowledgeable in a subject score poorly on exams because they aren’t good at the act of taking the exam. A tutor can help prepare you to do well when you sit for your exam.
How Far in Advance Should I Begin Tutoring for the HSC Exam?
If you already know that you struggle with biology, you might want to get a tutor at the beginning of the course itself. This way you will be able to keep up with the class, rather than try to cram and catch up at the end.
It’s always better to get ahead in the beginning and keep your stride, rather than wait until later to try to keep up.
If you are faring well with the content in your biology course, but want to have someone help you review and study as well as practice for the exam, you might wait until 1 or 2 months before the exam to start tutoring sessions.
How to Find an HSC Biology Tutor
Once you’ve decided to go ahead and hire a biology tutor, your next step is to find one who is a good match for your needs.
There are many tutors out there who have taken the HSC biology exam themselves, so you can be sure that they will have insight into the challenges you are facing and how you need to proceed.
There are a few crucial aspects of a tutor you’ll need to evaluate before you commit to receiving private tutoring and learning from them.
Availability
Do you both have the same times available in your schedule for regular meetings?
Do you prefer a face-to-face tutor, or online sessions instead? Keep in mind that you're more likely to find a tutor who can work with you in the early or late hours online.
Cost
Does the tutor fit into your budget? See if you can work out a payment plan or other arrangement if they are a little too pricey. Online tutors may be less expensive than in-person sessions.
Personality
Do you and the tutor get along on a personal level, or do you not mesh well? It’s alright to seek a different tutor if you feel like your personalities don’t match. After all, how are you going to have one-on-one sessions with someone you don’t really like?
Experience
Your ideal HSC biology tutor will have scored well on their own HSC biology exam in the past. Ask them what their experience with the HSC courses and exams is as well as their experience preparing other tutees to sit their exams.
Where to Look
Check out local listings for tutors in your area and see if you can find any tutors via your school. You might not be able to find a private tutor with availability near you, so thankfully you can also search online with a service like Superprof! You can find tutors from all over the country who can meet your availability and tutor you virtually.
How to Make the Most of Your Tutoring Sessions
Once you’ve begun seeing a biology tutor, you still need to do a few things to ensure that your meetings are helpful and effective.
Set Your Expectations with Your Tutor
In the initial meeting you have with your HSC biology tutor, discuss what you are personally striving to achieve by seeking tutoring. Talk out your goals with your tutor so they know how to best help you achieve those goals.
If you already know you will be on holiday at some point that will disrupt your tutoring schedule, make sure you let your tutor know. Then, they can make changes to their lesson plans for you.
Set SMART Goals for Yourself
SMART goals are
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
The purpose of setting SMART goals is to give yourself a definitive objective that you can strive for, and you’ll know when it has been reached.
You can set many SMART goals as you move through your tutoring sessions. The first goal you set might be something like this:
“I want to be able to talk about genetic mutations without needing to look at my lesson notes or second-guessing myself so I can do well in my biology presentation in two weeks.”
Here’s why this is a SMART goal:
- Specific: You have a particular topic you need to become knowledgable about
- Measurable: You need to be able to talk about it without using notes
- Achievable: This is a reasonable goal
- Relevant: This goal pertains directly to your HSC biology course
- Time-bound: You have two weeks to achieve the goal
After you’ve met this goal, you can set another SMART goal, and so on.
The overarching SMART goal you have might be
“I want to score in band 6 on the HSC biology exam in 2 months.”
Keep your tutor informed of your goals. Then, you can both take steps to get you towards that goal together.
Do Your Tutoring “Homework”
You probably already have homework from your actual class, so the idea of more homework might sound unbearable.
The purpose of homework assigned by your tutor should be to allow you to see how well you are grasping the subjects at hand and in what specific areas you need the most help. It might just be logging which areas you struggled in over the past week.
Having this information is valuable so the tutor knows what to spend more effort helping you with. It also helps you become self-aware of areas of difficulty.
Be Honest
When working with a tutor it’s important to be totally honest about how you’re feeling regarding the material and your progress. If you aren’t totally honest and say you feel comfortable with a topic because you feel like you should be, but in reality you need more practice, you’re only hurting yourself.
Your tutor is not there to judge you. They want you to learn and retain the information. If they think you already are, they can’t modify their methods or lesson plans to suit your needs. And, they were also students once; they know when you're fudging the truth.
Be Open to Assessment
Again, your tutor is not there to judge you. This is vital to keep in mind especially when they might give you sheets to fill out and other little tests to evaluate your progress. The point of tutoring is to find out how you best learn and use those techniques to help you do just that.
So when you might feel like you’re under a microscope, remember that it’s just a method for your tutor to see if all your practice is working or if there’s another direction to go in to make learning easier for you.
Send Practice Materials in Advance
If possible, send the materials for an upcoming session in advance so your tutor can plan how to help you before the lesson begins.
Ask Questions
Don’t be afraid to ask questions! Any questions you have are important, whether it’s about the biology material, a learning technique, or the process of tutoring itself.
Stay Focused
Do your very best to stay engaged and focused during a lesson. It can be hard to maintain focus, especially since you likely have dozens of other things that require you to focus during the days and weeks, however, you really need to make sure that you are tuned in for that biology tutoring session. Otherwise, it won’t be very beneficial.
Review Your Notes from Tutoring
Add your notes from tutoring to your study materials for the HSC biology exam. Any and all information you can add to your study packet is valuable! Plus, since it’s from your tutoring sessions, the information will already be presented in the form that’s most helpful to you!
You can also apply the learning techniques from your tutoring sessions to other topics in class that you don’t cover in your tutoring.
Tutoring Lessons For Life
The great thing about tutoring is that it helps students learn skills and techniques that you can apply to any other aspect of your life that you want!
In the future, when you encounter a difficult concept either in university or in your career, you can use what you learned from tutoring to break down the information and make it accessible to yourself.
You will also already know what works for you and what doesn’t if you ever seek tutoring again. Then, you can save time at the beginning of your new tutoring relationship.
You can also consider counsellors, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, health coaches, life coaches, wellness coaches, business coaches, and any other kind of coach to be tutors in their own way! Knowing how to work with tutors like these will also help you throughout your life.
When you enlist a tutor, you not only learn what they are helping you with, you learn how to be an effective student, someone who can listen and learn from another.
Knowing how to actually listen and incorporate information is not only crucial for your academic success in HSC biology and the exam, it’s a lifelong skill that will help you succeed in all areas!
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