What I'd Do Differently If I Sat VCE Maths Again

I remember finishing Maths Methods and thinking I’d done everything right. Practised questions. Went through past exams. Paid $80 a week for a tutor.

Turned up on the day. And still walked out knowing I’d left marks on the table.

I grew up in regional Victoria. Specialist Maths and Methods weren’t subjects where things came naturally to me, and the tutoring situation was what it was: a family friend who genuinely tried, but didn’t have the resources or the VCE-specific knowledge to really help. There were no other options where I lived. That wasn’t a complaint — it was just the reality of growing up in regional VIC.

I’m not the 99 ATAR guy. I’m not writing this because I aced it and want to hand you the formula. I’m writing this because I sat those exams with real gaps in my preparation, and now, having built EquateIt specifically around the problems I lived, I can see exactly what they were.

Here’s what I’d actually change.

What should I do differently to improve my VCE Maths score?

The biggest gains in VCE Maths come from three specific habits: marking your own work the way VCAA marks it (not generously), tracking your exact weak topics and drilling those specifically, and practising on your CAS until it’s second nature. Volume of practice matters less than quality of feedback. Most students do more questions than they need to — and learn less from each one than they should because nobody is marking the steps the way an examiner would.

Are you marking yourself the way you’d want to be marked?

This is the one I wish someone had told me clearly in Year 11.

When you go through a practice exam and mark your own work, there’s a pull to give yourself the mark anyway. “I had the right idea.” “My answer was basically right.” “I just made an arithmetic error at the end.”

VCAA doesn’t mark you the way you mark yourself. VCAA marks the journey, not just the destination.

In Methods and Specialist, there are three types of marks: method marks (for setting up the problem correctly), accuracy marks (for the correct final answer), and consequential marks (for correctly following through from an earlier step, even if that step was wrong). You can get the right final answer with the wrong working and still lose marks. You can make one error early in a multi-step question and still pick up marks on the steps that follow, as long as you carry through correctly.

The students who lose the most marks aren’t usually the ones who don’t know the content. They’re the ones who skip the reasoning step, get the answer right, never write the working VCAA expected, and mark themselves fine.

I was marking myself generously on practice exams — calling a step “close enough” when a VCAA examiner wouldn’t have. That’s not a small thing. When you mark yourself that way, you’re training yourself to accept a wrong method. You’re practising failure.

If I were doing it again: mark every step. Every line. Use the full marking scheme, not just the answer key.

The difference between a 30 and a 37 is often nothing to do with what you know. It’s whether you showed it the right way.

Know your actual weaknesses, not just “I’m bad at Methods”

“I’m bad at Maths Methods” is the most useless piece of self-knowledge you can have.

It tells you nothing. You can’t study “bad at Methods.” You can study “I keep losing marks on related rates when the chain rule combines with a word problem” — that’s specific enough to do something with.

Even through engineering, I always struggled to recognise what my actual weaknesses were. I’d finish a practice exam, make a mental note of the topics I’d missed, and tell myself I’d go back to them.

Two weeks later it would be SAC day and I’d be staring at that exact question. I’d forgotten to revise it. A mental note is not a system.

The fix isn’t motivation — it’s structure. After every practice exam or SAC result, write down the exact sub-topic of every question you dropped marks on. Not just “calculus.” “Optimisation problems with a geometric constraint.” “Probability with conditional dependence.” That list is your study plan.

Then revisit it. Not once — repeatedly, until you’re getting it right every time. If your targeted revision list is getting shorter week on week, that’s how you know the practice is working.

If you’re using your school holiday period to catch up, what to study these winter holidays is built around this exact approach: your Semester 1 SAC results as your diagnostic, then targeted study rather than covering everything again.

Learn your CAS properly — most students (and teachers) stop at surface level

Exam 2 in both Methods and Specialist is almost entirely CAS-active. If you’re slow on your calculator, or you’re doing calculations by hand that your CAS could handle in five seconds, you’re losing time and accuracy on every question.

The problem is most students learn the basics — solve an equation, graph a function — and stop. They don’t know how to use user-defined functions (UDFs), how to define functions that persist across calculations, or when to actually use the calculator versus go by hand. And here’s the part nobody says out loud: most teachers don’t know their CAS to its full potential either. The manual is hundreds of pages long and nobody reads it cover to cover.

In VCE Maths, your CAS can be make or break. Most students only know the surface level — and so do a lot of their teachers. You only really learn it by seeing it used in context, on real exam questions, over and over. Not from memorising commands you forget the moment you close the manual.

What actually works is seeing your CAS used in real exam questions — repeatedly — until the steps become automatic. Not a command list. Not a YouTube tutorial you watch once. In context, on questions that look like the ones you’ll face on the day.

Stop hunting for questions — have a bank sorted by topic

When you get a question type wrong, you need more practice on that exact type. Not the next topic. Not a random past paper. Three more questions that test the same skill, done immediately, so the correction is still fresh.

The biggest time sink I had was looking through past exams trying to find something similar to what I’d just gotten wrong. You go through the 2023 exam, then the 2022, then you end up on a different topic entirely and half an hour is gone. That’s wasted study time — and it’s not even targeted when you find it.

If you get the chain rule wrong, you need chain rule questions right now — not eventually. A bank sorted by AOS and sub-topic means zero hunting. You flag the skill, you drill it, you move on.

The full breakdown of what tools can actually help with this is in the best AI tools to study VCE, if you want an honest comparison.

Build your bound reference as you learn, not the week before the SAC

Your bound reference is a tool for the exam. It should reflect your weaknesses, not look like a textbook.

If you’re spending two days before a SAC copying out formulas and colour-coding headings, you’re not studying. You’re decorating. The time spent building the bound reference is time not spent doing the thing that actually moves your mark: practising questions, under marking conditions, and fixing the gaps.

Build it as you go. Every time you get a question type wrong, add the method to your bound reference while you’re learning it. By the time the exam arrives, you’ll have a reference that maps exactly to your gaps — not a generic summary of the whole study design that looks great but doesn’t actually help when the pressure is on.

Get a tutor who works from your actual errors — or don’t pay for sessions that don’t

I don’t want to be harsh about this, because the person tutoring me was genuinely trying. But $80 a week for sessions that weren’t built around my specific errors wasn’t moving my mark.

A tutor who doesn’t know where your marks are leaking can’t target the session at the right things. They go through what they’re comfortable teaching — which is often not what you specifically need. And when the session ends, you’ve covered ground you might’ve been mostly fine on anyway.

What actually helps is a tutor who comes into a session knowing exactly which sub-topics cost you marks in your last SAC or practice exam, and builds the hour around closing those specific gaps. That’s targeted tutoring — and it’s genuinely worth the money.

If you’re trying to weigh up whether a tutor or a structured AI tool makes more sense for where you’re at right now, the AI tutoring vs human tutoring comparison lays out the full picture honestly.

What does it all come down to?

All of this comes back to the same thing: targeted, well-marked practice beats volume every single time.

More questions, done sloppily and not followed through on, don’t move your mark. Fewer questions, marked the way VCAA marks them, tied to your specific weak spots, followed up on immediately — that’s what does.

I built EquateIt around exactly this because I didn’t have access to any of it growing up in regional VIC. The auto-marking works the way VCAA marks it, step by step, not just the final answer. The weakness tracker records every question you drop marks on and sends you targeted practice on that exact skill until you’re getting it right. The question bank is sorted by AOS and sub-topic so you can drill the exact thing you’re struggling with — no hunting.

It’s what I wish I’d had in Year 12 — that, and actually sitting full VCAA Methods and Specialist past exams under timed conditions instead of just reading through notes.

If you’re in Year 11 or 12 right now and your Methods or Specialist results aren’t where you want them, try EquateIt free. No credit card. 14 days. See for yourself.