The Best Way to Study for Exams (VCE & HSC, 2026)

The best way to study for exams is to test yourself instead of re-reading. Retrieving information from memory (active recall), spreading that practice over several days (spaced repetition), and sitting full, timed past papers under exam conditions beat passive methods like re-reading and highlighting. Those passive methods feel productive but barely move your marks. Below is the evidence, plus a concrete weekly routine for VCE and HSC.

• Active recall: trying to remember something without looking is the single highest-value study technique.
• Spaced repetition: revisiting material across several days locks it into long-term memory far better than one long session.
• Timed past papers: full exams under real conditions train both your knowledge and your exam technique at once.
• Re-reading and highlighting: they feel like learning but produce weak, short-lived recall.
• Honest marking: marking your own work against the marking guide is where most of the improvement actually happens.

Why re-reading and highlighting feel productive but fail

Re-reading and highlighting are the two most common study methods, and they are close to the least effective. They feel good because the material looks familiar each time your eyes pass over it, and that familiarity tricks your brain into believing you have learned it. But recognising a page is not the same as being able to produce the answer in an exam, where nothing is in front of you. In a 2013 review of study techniques, Dunlosky and colleagues rated highlighting and re-reading as low-utility, while practice testing and spaced practice came out as the two highest-utility techniques across a wide range of students and subjects. If you only change one thing about how you study, stop re-reading and start testing yourself.

The best way to study for exams: active recall

Active recall (also called retrieval practice or the testing effect) means closing the book and forcing yourself to retrieve the answer from memory. Every time you successfully pull a fact or a method out of your head, you strengthen the path back to it, which is precisely what an exam demands. A well-known 2006 experiment by Roediger and Karpicke found that students who practised retrieving material remembered far more of it a week later than students who simply re-read the same material in the same time. Same time spent, much stronger retention.

In practice, active recall looks like this: read a section once, shut the book, and write down everything you can remember. Turn each syllabus dot point or study-design key knowledge point into a question and answer it from memory before checking. Use flashcards where one side asks and the other answers, and say the answer out loud before flipping. The discomfort of struggling to remember is the feeling of learning working. Easy revision usually means no learning is happening.

Spaced repetition: study less each day, remember more

Spaced repetition means spreading your revision of a topic across several shorter sessions over days and weeks, instead of one long block. Memory fades on a predictable curve, and each time you revisit material just as you are starting to forget it, the forgetting slows down. Three twenty-minute sessions on Monday, Thursday and the following Tuesday will beat one solid hour the night before, even though the total time is the same. This is why starting early matters more than studying hard: you cannot space practice you crammed into one week. A term-long plan, like the one in our VCE study schedule, builds the spacing in for you.

A simple system: keep a list of every topic per subject, and tag each one as needing review in one day, three days, one week, or two weeks based on how confident you felt last time. Anything you got wrong drops back to a one-day gap. Anything you nailed moves out to a longer gap. Most flashcard apps automate this, but a notebook works just as well.

Timed past papers: the best way to study for exam technique

Past papers are the closest thing to the real exam, and doing them under timed, closed-book conditions is the most powerful single study activity available to a Year 12 student. A timed paper trains three things at once: your recall of content, your exam technique, and your stamina for sitting still and thinking hard for two or three hours. Reading the marking guide afterwards then shows you exactly what markers reward, which is information you cannot get any other way. For more on this, see our guide on whether practice exams are worth it.

Do them properly. Sit the whole paper in one go, timed, with no notes and no phone. Read the marks and the directive verb first: identify, describe, explain, justify and evaluate each demand a different kind of answer, and the mark count tells you how much to write. A two-mark question wants two distinct points, not a paragraph. Treat trial exams as rehearsals rather than as the finish line; the comparison between the two is covered in trial exams versus the real thing.

Interleaving: mix topics instead of blocking them

Interleaving means mixing different topics or question types in one session rather than drilling one topic until you move on. If you have three maths topics to revise, do a few questions from each in a rotating order instead of finishing all of topic one before starting topic two. It feels harder and messier, and that is the point: in a real exam you never know which topic the next question will test, so practising the switch between topics is itself a skill. Blocked practice makes you good at a topic when you already know which topic it is; interleaving makes you good at recognising which method a question needs.

How to mark honestly and close the gaps

Marking your own work against the marking guide is where most of your improvement comes from, and it only works if you are ruthless. After a timed paper, mark it strictly against the VCAA or NESA marking guide, giving yourself a mark only for points the guide actually credits. Do not give yourself half a mark because you knew it. The examiner will not, so neither should you. The published examiner reports are the best free resource going: they spell out exactly where students lost marks and what a full answer looked like.

Then close the gap. For every mark you dropped, write down why: was it a content gap, a misread question, a timing problem, or a sloppy explanation? Send the underlying topic back to a one-day review gap and re-drill it. A week later, do questions on that same topic again to confirm it has stuck. This loop of doing, marking honestly, and re-drilling the weak spots is the engine of exam improvement, and it is exactly the work that lifts a study score or band rather than leaving it flat.

A concrete weekly study routine

Here is a simple weekly routine that builds all of the above into a repeatable structure. Adjust the number of subjects and hours to your situation, but keep the shape: short active-recall sessions through the week, spaced reviews, and at least one full timed paper.

1. Monday to Thursday: two or three focused blocks of about 45 minutes each evening. Open each block with five minutes of recall on a topic from last week, then learn or drill the new topic by self-testing, not re-reading.
2. Spaced reviews: at the start of every session, run flashcards or quick recall on anything tagged for review that day. Wrong answers drop back to a one-day gap.
3. Interleave: within a subject, rotate between two or three topics in a session rather than blocking one.
4. Saturday: one full, timed, closed-book past paper in your hardest subject. Mark it honestly against the marking guide the same day while it is fresh.
5. Sunday: review the Saturday paper. List every dropped mark, find the cause, and schedule the weak topics for re-drilling in the coming week. Take the rest of the day off.

Quality beats quantity here. Students often count time spent near their books as study, but time at the desk tends to run well ahead of focused, attentive study. Two hours of self-testing with your phone in another room will teach you more than five hours of half-attention re-reading. Protect your sleep, keep moving, and use short breaks so your focus holds. Your ATAR is a rank built from how you perform across your subjects, so the goal is simple: be genuinely prepared in each one. See how to get a good ATAR for how that fits the bigger picture, and try the ATAR calculator to see where your subjects sit today.