Academic success didn’t always come naturally to me…

It was halfway through my final year of high school. My maths teacher and I were discussing my results for the mid-year exam. I glanced up from the page, tears filling my eyes. “What more could I have done?” I asked. I was heartbroken. Devastated.

“I don’t know. You put in so much effort,” my maths teacher answered.

I had failed. Massively.

Sure, I was enrolled in the highest and most difficult stream of mathematics offered at high school level, and it was not uncommon for students to fail. However, the average across my grade had been a whopping 85% — sending me straight to the bottom of the ranks.

We stood there in the dimly-lit hallway outside the teachers’ staff room, putting together the pieces of the puzzle. For more than a month I had studied an average of 30 hours per week, just for this subject. These hours did not include face time at school. It was a very stressful period of my life. Unable to compete with the other students on the basis of pure intelligence, I opted for the route involving dedicated practice and commitment.

“Practice makes perfect” — doesn’t it? Apparently not.

For more than 120 hours over the space of one month, I had poured my heart and soul into my practice. Most if not all of the other students who had taken this maths course had been receiving tuition for some months prior to the exam; they considered themselves well prepared. They didn’t feel the need to spend copious amounts of time studying for maths when they needed to focus on their other subjects as well. Thus, they had not spent anywhere near the amount of time studying that I had. I knew this for a fact, as did my teacher. And yet they all scored super-high marks, and I hadn’t even come close.

What had gone wrong? My teacher and I were stumped.

My entire understanding of the science behind getting good grades shattered in those moments. For so many years I had been told that if I spent lots of time and effort studying, I would get high marks. Such lies — lies, I tell you!

Standing there in front of my teacher, thinking about all my hours of dedicated practice, I realised I had been severely mistaken.

The relationship between grades and time spent studying was not at all proportional

— as evidenced by my results.

Time seemed to be an almost irrelevant factor for academic success.

Some weeks later, I found myself caught up in a wave of nervous anticipation that had swept through my entire grade. It was the week the principal was holding interviews with each of us. The purpose of these interviews was for him to assess our performance thus far and predict our final marks and rank. This would determine what courses we could enrol in at university.

Despite my hardest efforts, my failure in maths was sure to pull me down. I had also made the additional mistake of neglecting to study for all my other subjects as much as I should have. Nervously I waited and waited. Finally, it was my turn.

After the interview, I walked out of the principal’s office, mulling over his words. With these results, assuming I continued on this trajectory, I was looking at an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank) of around 70*. There was still room for improvement, and he had said that I could probably raise it to around 85 at the very highest, depending on my future performance as well as the performance of my cohort. Unfortunately, with less than five months to go and only a handful of assessments left in each subject, he estimated it would be a very tight squeeze. Even if I could pull this off and increase my grades dramatically in the final assessments, he was still very doubtful that I would be able to achieve a rank anywhere nearer to the 90s.

I was totally gutted. My parents had very high expectations of me. My teachers and the school also had high expectations of me. Most importantly, perhaps, I had high expectations of myself. I refused to let my efforts go to waste.

(*For those unfamiliar with the ATAR, it is a reverse ranking system where the highest rank is 99.95 and then decreases in increments of 0.05. A ranking above 99.0 would place a student in the top 1% of the state.)

Discovering the goldmine for academic success

With this conviction and a heck of a lot of stubbornness, I powered through the rest of my final year in high school. I’ll be honest with you here. There were many times I wanted to give up. There were moments when I doubted myself and almost crumbled under the pressure. I am so glad that I persevered.

This experience had a profound impact on me, one I am still noticing years later. I look back on those events and can easily spot the changes that followed, and how they were influenced by my failure.

I graduated that year and, as expected, I sat my final exams. Some months later, the results were released. My ATAR of 96.20 had placed me in the top 4% of the state. That morning I received a call from my rather shocked deputy principal. My results had knocked the hats off my teachers’ heads. For them, I had achieved the near impossible.

Today, as an educator, I look back on these events and can pinpoint the factors that led me to achieve these exceptional grades. At the time, my high school self thought she had just created a system for surviving academic hell. Resigned to the belief that she would not be able to achieve anything higher than she was already achieving, she just went through the motions. Accepting this as her fate, she approached her studies with a general attitude of not-really-giving-a-damn, but without condemning herself to certain failure. There was no special motivation to achieve results higher than what the principal had told her were within her grasp.

Somehow, though, she did. Somewhere in the process, she unknowingly discovered an academic gold mine. The systems she had created for surviving academic hell were the exact ones she needed to achieve academic success.

The educator in me is fascinated by these systems, even to this day. I have copied them, tweaked them, used them in my own studies thereafter, and as experimentations with dozens upon dozens of high school students I have worked with for almost a decade. As a result, my students have been able to achieve such outstanding results as well, many even surpassing my own. For instance, in 3 weeks of using this system, one of my students went from achieving average results to ranking in the top 5 for most of his subjects!

This is a tried and tested system that works. I have no solid, scientific reason for why it does; I’m still figuring that part out, you see. All I know right now is that it involves hacking the way students learn, by decreasing the time they spend on school-related activities and increasing their intrinsic motivation for study.

This website shares the story of how the 16-year-old me hacked her education. It is also a recipe for how the teenaged version of you can follow in her footsteps and achieve similar results — if not completely surpass them.

On here you will find a wealth of information and methods for replicating these results. Rather than limiting these solutions to the system I followed in high school, I have included a large number of alternative solutions that have worked for many of my students. Everyone learns differently and, for this reason, I have included a wide range of suggestions for you to choose from. Choose the suggestions that you think will work best for you. Tweak them to suit you even more, if you like. Just remember to keep the underlying principles the same.

Now, go forth and conquer your academic battles!