What to Do Between HSC Exams (and What to Stop Doing)

The HSC written exams run across October and November, and for most students that's four to six papers spread over weeks. Which means the exam period is mostly not exams. It's gaps — a day here, four days there, a weekend somewhere in the middle.

What you do in those gaps decides more than anything you did in the last fortnight of term, and most students handle them badly. Not because they're lazy.

The hole after an exam

The afternoon after a paper is the least productive study time of the year. You're flat, the adrenaline is leaving, and part of your brain is still in the hall re-reading question 6.

Studying through it is how people sit at a desk for three hours, absorb nothing, feel guilty, and lose the evening too.

So don't. Write off the rest of the day deliberately — as a decision with a time on it, not a collapse. Sleep, eat, see a person, move. Then start properly the next morning.

The students still functioning in week three aren't the ones who studied every afternoon. They're the ones who stopped on purpose and restarted on purpose.

Skip the post-mortem

Within ten minutes of walking out, someone will ask what you got for the last question. This is the most damaging conversation of the exam period.

You cannot change the paper. You cannot gain a mark. What you can acquire is a vivid, specific, confident belief that you got something wrong — often from someone who is themselves wrong — and carry it into a paper you haven't sat yet. The feeling is real, the information isn't, and the cost lands later.

Debrief once if you must, briefly, then stop. And pick who with: some people process by catastrophising out loud, and you aren't obliged to be there for it two days before your next exam.

Matching the work to the gap

The mistake is treating a two-day gap like a study period — making a plan, re-reading notes, building a summary. In two days that's theatre.

Gap	What's worth doing
Same day	Nothing. Eat, sleep, move. Start tomorrow.
1 day	One past paper section under time, marked honestly. Nothing new.
2–3 days	Your weakest two topics, as questions. One full paper if it's a long one.
4+ days	A past paper early, fix what it exposes, another near the end.

Three rules hold across all of them.

Work from questions, not notes. Re-reading in a gap this short is close to worthless — it feels productive precisely because it's familiar. Doing questions tells you what you can't do yet, which is the only thing you can still act on.

Mark it honestly. The marking is the point, not the doing. "I would have got that" is not a mark. If you're unsure whether an answer earned it, that uncertainty is what to go and resolve — the marking criteria are published for exactly this.

Go at your worst topic. You know this and you'll still open the subject you like. You only get a couple of real shots in a gap — spend them where the marks are missing.

Two exams, two days apart

It happens to nearly everyone at least once. Give the earlier paper the bulk of the time, but don't let the second go cold: half an hour of retrieval keeps a subject warm far more cheaply than relearning it the night before.

In practice, the day between belongs to the next exam, the evening before belongs to the one after, and the second subject gets less. That isn't bad planning. It's a timetable you didn't choose.

Thinking you failed

Somewhere in there you'll walk out certain one went badly. Nearly everyone does.

You're a poor judge of your own paper, and that's not a pep talk — it's how memory works under stress. The questions that went badly are vivid and specific; the twenty that went fine aren't. Your sense of how it went is built almost entirely from the worst parts.

And it's finished. Those marks are fixed. The next paper is worth everything it was worth yesterday, and it's the only one you can still change.

If something genuinely went wrong — illness, or something happened — that's a different situation with an actual process, and it usually starts at school on the day.

The boring things

Across several weeks these matter more than any technique:

• Sleep on a schedule, including after the afternoon papers when you're wired.
• Eat actual meals. Exam period is when people live on toast and energy drinks and wonder why week two feels awful.
• Get outside once a day. Weeks indoors with your own thoughts is harder than people expect.
• Keep one thing that isn't the HSC. A run, a show, a friend who doesn't do your subjects.

The bottom line

Between now and results, the gaps are where your remaining marks live.

Write off the afternoon after each exam on purpose. Skip the post-mortem. In each gap do questions rather than notes, mark them honestly, and aim at your weakest topic. Then sleep properly and do it again.

You can't change the papers you've sat. Everything else is still in front of you.