I don't know how to study for chemistry. (1 Viewer)

turntaker

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How should I be learning my chemistry. I plan to do 1 hour of chem every day.
 

dan964

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write up syllabus first.
then past papers.

know your stuff before practising.
 
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You just started year 12, you haven't learnt anything solid yet.

The way you study for chem is
>Understand concepts and calculations
>Rote learn info
>Past papers
 

HeroicPandas

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Read notes/textbook and examine the syllabus. Make sure you can answer every dot point on the syllabus and actually understand it too and to make sure you understand something, make sure you can explain whatever it is to someone clearly and LOGICALLY. E.g., your friend asks to you why a catalyst is used in reactions. If your answer is just to speed up the reaction, then you haven't understood this concept. Need the reason why it speeds up the reaction.

Most of chem is lots of memorisation of facts about chemistry, which tend to get boring...

Once you get the content down, you MUST APPLY it (which is the hard part in my opinion) by doing practice questions/HSC QUESTIONS

TIP 1: constantly test yourself to see if you understand/remembered the content - good way to learn
TIP 2: if you have the motivation and energy, then try this routine out: after everyday you learn chem, get a blank sheet of paper and without the aid of notes, write down everything you learnt that day - I did this for 2 days and it was EXTREMELY helpful but I couldn't do it anymore because it took out most of my energy. You can do this routine monthly instead of daily, up to you to decide
TIP 3: when marking your own completed past papers, mark as harsh as you can so you can identify your mistakes and fix them

GL!
 
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I suggest doing past papers. However, doing everything all at once seems to be a waste of time to me. I suggest picking out the questions that you can't do, and doing those/asking for help from your teacher.

It also helps me to do multiple choice questions because you can instantly know if you're right or wrong. MC questions also do not take that long, you could probably do every single one of them in 1 day. If you're doing Industrial Chemistry for your option, there are some really good MC questions from 1995-2000 as well.

But before doing all that, I familiarised myself with the syllabus by going through every question in Conquering HSC Chemistry by Roland Smith.

By the way, http://www4.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/hsc.cfm is absolutely useless in that it only goes through a small pool of questions, some of them not even in the syllabus (such as electrolytic cells in the core).

Good luck.
 
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