WACE Exam Day Checklist for Perth Students

The WACE exams are 90% preparation and 10% logistics. Most marks are won (or quietly lost) before you ever sit down at the desk. The students who walk in calm, on time, with the right gear, and who execute a simple in-exam routine, beat equally smart students who turned up flustered with the wrong calculator. This checklist is what we send every Educatta Yr 12 student in the week before exams.

Print it. Stick it on the fridge. Run through it the night before each exam.

The night before

• Eat dinner you know agrees with you. Tonight is not the night for a new Thai place.
• Do a 30-minute light review only. No new content. No marathon cramming.
• Set two alarms. Phone on charge. Charger out of bag.
• Aim to be in bed by 10pm. 8 hours sleep is worth more than another hour of revision.

The morning of

What to leave at home (or in your locker)

• Phone, smartwatch, fitness tracker, headphones (must be turned off and bagged anyway)
• Notes, textbooks, sticky notes, anything written on your hand
• Coloured pens (unless your subject explicitly allows)
• Snacks with branding or wrappers (clear-wrap snacks only if permitted)
• A second calculator that is not on the SCSA approved list

Calculators by subject

This catches students out every year. WACE exam calculator rules vary by subject. The big ones:

• Maths Methods, Applications and Specialist: Each has a Section 1 (calculator-free) and a Section 2 (CAS or scientific). Bring your CAS. Bring spare batteries.
• Chemistry and Physics: Approved scientific calculator only. No CAS. Check the SCSA list before you walk out the door.
• Human Biology: No calculator required, but a basic scientific is permitted.
• English and most humanities: No calculator.

If you are doing both maths and a science back-to-back, pack both calculators. Tape a sticky label on each so you grab the right one under pressure.

In the exam: a 5-step routine

1. Reading time (10 mins). Read the entire paper start to finish. Do not start mentally solving yet. Mark with a small dot the questions you can definitely do.
2. Easy wins first. Start with your dotted questions. Build momentum. Bank marks.
3. Time per mark. Roughly 1.5 to 2 minutes per mark, depending on the subject. If a 4-mark question is taking 12 minutes, move on and come back.
4. Show working always. Method marks are real. A wrong final answer with correct working can still earn 70 to 80% of the marks.
5. Last 10 minutes. No new questions. Check arithmetic, units, and that every page has been answered.

Managing exam anxiety

Some nerves are normal. Useful, even. The trick is keeping them at "engaged" rather than "frozen". Three things that work:

• Box breathing in the 60 seconds before the supervisor says "you may now begin": 4 in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold. Three rounds.
• Skip and return. If a question knocks you, leave it, do three you can do, and come back. The brain works on the hard one in the background.
• Talk to someone. If anxiety is more than nerves, tell your school counsellor or your Educatta learning advisor. Real support exists.

Between exams

• Do not debrief with friends about the paper you just finished. It changes nothing and frequently freaks people out.
• If you have a 24-hour gap before the next exam, take 4 hours of complete rest first, then revisit your weakest topic. No marathons.
• Eat a proper meal. Sleep early. Repeat.

The morning after the last exam

You sleep in. You let it go. Whatever happened in those rooms is now out of your hands, and the result will arrive in December. Until then, your only job is to recover. We will see plenty of you again at our Bentley and Canning Vale centres a year later, this time as tutors. Good luck.

If you would like a Yr 12 mock-exam practice session before the real thing, our small-group classes run timed papers every Saturday in Term 4. Book a free trial to sit one.