ANYONE GOT ANY
TIPS FOR
ENGINEERING HSC?
Lowkey fucked for it
focus on:
1) Drawing - specifically bolt dimension as per AS1100, sectioning and correct dimensioning. Know how to quickly freehand drawings where asked, and where you need to spend more time accurately dimensioning the drawing - since drawing in general is pretty time consuming. I ran out of time while working on the last drawing question - so I easily lost around 3-4 marks out of 6 off the bat due to time, don't be me!
2) Calculations - especially SFD, BMD and method of joints/sections- these tend to show up 100% every year. You will probably also be asked about stress strain diagrams, and calculating the shear force of a material. Other kinds of calculations to consider are gear ratio/moment questions that you will find in Personal and Public transport, and the lift/drag questions you find in aeronautical. In general, just practice them all, calculations easily make up up to 40 - 50% of the paper, so you can easily score big by nailing them (they get pretty repetitive too, only the values change year to year, so get practicing!)
3) Material properties - Know the processes behind hardening steels (I recommend just using the example of induction hardening, since its easy to apply to a range of hardening scenarios, and memorise their crystal structures - especially in regards to welds, rolling processes and other working processes. Knowing the difference between thermoset and thermoplastics can be helpful too. You can guarantee at least 2-3 questions will involve material properties. Also
CORROSION - given this is mainly brought up in relation to the aeronautical topic, I recommend memorising the cases of Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) and Galvanic corrosion, since these are common in aircraft and can be easily discussed in regards to causes and prevention. I wrote a pretty in depth section about types of corrosion in one of my HSC Eng. reports, link here for more reading:
https://boredofstudies.org/resources/aeronautical-engineering-report.20411/
4) Telecommunications - Know your wave diagrams, thats all pretty much it
5) Safety/Role of the engineer - This comes up sometimes as a ~5 marker (ie: "Why do aerospace engineers need to follow safe design, and what are the consequences for not following them (737MAX for example). There are some specific things here you'll need to know, so definitely revise this at least in brief.
The rest of the syllabus is pretty irrelevant most of the time - history basically never comes up outside some rare MCQ's, and if you've researched you're take home reports well, you should have no problem pulling up various examples for various questions. If you know everything above broadly, you can at least guarantee a band 5, and with some refinement, you can easily score a band 6.
Additionally, here's a compilation of all the drawing questions from 2008 - 2022 if you need it:
Good luck for the HSC, and pray they don't ask you to draw an apple watch or something