How to achieve a band 6 in modern history, prelim and hsc. (1 Viewer)

[gleeek]

Any people who have completed or are completing modern history, do you have any tips or study tactics? I'm starting it next year and want to ace it.

Also give me information about the course in your opinion.

Thanks you're helping out a lot by answering

 

[slyhunter]

Get into the habit of summarising information since it's a content heavy course, make things easier for yourself. Practicing answering questions once you think you know the content.

This is an excellent essay writing guide which I suggest you read:
http://community.boredofstudies.org/showthread.php?t=264934

There's also a number of quirky ways you could use like flashcards, post-it notes to help memorise quotes/historians etc.

 

[gleeek]

Get into the habit of summarising information since it's a content heavy course, make things easier for yourself. Practicing answering questions once you think you know the content.

This is an excellent essay writing guide which I suggest you read:
http://community.boredofstudies.org/showthread.php?t=264934


There's also a number of quirky ways you could use like flashcards, post-it notes to help memorise quotes/historians etc.

hanks for the link dude. Helped out alot. Gonna use it for future reference.

 

[Lis020393]

Hey
I'm doing modern for my HSC this year and if you wanna ace it, here are some study tips

Study tactics:
-you need to know content as well as write a lot of practice essays, people in my school usually memorise essays but I think it's easier just memorising points/quotes/historians
- it does require a lot of reading, make sure you just go through all handouts and summarize or just highlight quotes/historians which may be useful in an essay (I do Douglas MacArthur as my personality and it requires a lot of historiography so I always watch out for useful quotes)
- you also need to balance sophistication with clarity, so after you write a practice essay, read over it and see whether it makes sense to you because you could have excellent content but may be too wordy therefore your argument becomes unclear

I think that modern's definitely a very challenging course but it's also very rewarding when you put in the work, I reckon if you enjoy reading and essay writing you should definitely do it.

Another tip, for the core (WWI), you only need a very 'shallow' but broad understanding of the course because the HSC core section only has one 6-marker question and 10 marker but you have to know, according to my teacher, 12 lines of content for every topic (i.e. Reasons for the Outbreak of War, British/German propaganda,etc)

I hope that helps

 

[gleeek]

Hey
I'm doing modern for my HSC this year and if you wanna ace it, here are some study tips

Study tactics:
-you need to know content as well as write a lot of practice essays, people in my school usually memorise essays but I think it's easier just memorising points/quotes/historians
- it does require a lot of reading, make sure you just go through all handouts and summarize or just highlight quotes/historians which may be useful in an essay (I do Douglas MacArthur as my personality and it requires a lot of historiography so I always watch out for useful quotes)
- you also need to balance sophistication with clarity, so after you write a practice essay, read over it and see whether it makes sense to you because you could have excellent content but may be too wordy therefore your argument becomes unclear

I think that modern's definitely a very challenging course but it's also very rewarding when you put in the work, I reckon if you enjoy reading and essay writing you should definitely do it.

Another tip, for the core (WWI), you only need a very 'shallow' but broad understanding of the course because the HSC core section only has one 6-marker question and 10 marker but you have to know, according to my teacher, 12 lines of content for every topic (i.e. Reasons for the Outbreak of War, British/German propaganda,etc)

I hope that helps

Thank you for your time! Helpful response.

 

[D94]

Make notes for each dot point (for National, Person, Conflict), but do so as if you are answering an essay question. You could divide it into 5 headings and make a summary with the use of historiography.

You could also use images and videos to learn; you may be a visual person and understand a whole topic based off a few images or replaying a video excerpt in your head etc.

The course is meant for extensive reading; just read whenever you can. You'll most likely retain the information when you read casually, rather than frantically the night before an exam.

 

[bigbirdbanana]

Know your syllabus dot points inside and out, i cannot stress the importance of this enough! With the syllabus you'll also notice (I'm not sure if it's the same in prelim) that there are subheadings with dot points underneath them. If a question asks you for example, 'Evaluate the significance of the Treaty of Versailles in the collapse of the Weimar Republic', you would not only explore the Treaty, but also other factors listed under the subheading. Generally you would be arguing that 'Whilst [insert dot point here, eg Treaty of Versailles] was an important factor in [...] there were also elements involved, such as [...].' This way you show the marker that you not only have a deep knowledge of the course, but also that you recognise the issues involved in understanding the causal factors in history and that there are usually many reasons that things occur.

Secondly, make sure you know historians! I'm not saying that your entire essay should be others' opinions, just that you should be able to reference them to show that you understand the course well, particularly the conflicting opinions about the significance of certain events etc. If you remember quotes that's fantastic, but name dropping is also good, 'Historians such as Kolb have cited this as an important factor in...'. If you can't remember any specific historians to back up your point just reference historians generally 'Whilst some historians belive [...], others point to [...] as a major cause of [...]'. This is okay to do occasionally but make sure you at least know some! (I'm not sure how much emphasis your school will place on this for prelim, but definitely for HSC). I would recommend going to the resources section of this website to look at the historiographies compiled by other users to gather quotes.

Some of this is more useful for HSC as opposed to prelim, but i hope this helped!

 

[cem]

Make sure that you read and actually answer the question asked - there is always a question there and you would be surprised at how often students don't even refer to the key words in the question - they simply write what they have decided to write about and ignore the question (this is a big problem with the Part B of personalities where many students look at the final dot point and simply prepare an argument on that point and never even realise that there is a question - and they go overboard with historians - I have read responses that are 80% + historians and their arguments but have no links made to the question asked.

Even in the Core make sure that you address the question and don't just write about the sources but actually refer to the content specified in the question.

Simple I know but you would be surprised how many students ignore those simple points.