HSC revision built from your own notes
Upload your class notes, your textbook chapter, or a recording of the lesson you missed. Get cue cards, quizzes, practice questions and condensed notes generated from your material — and cited back to it.
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Your material in, revision out
Scholarly does not hand you a generic HSC deck. It reads what you upload and builds revision from that, so the questions are about your course.
Upload what you already have
Class notes, the textbook chapter, your own copy of the syllabus, a lesson recording, a photo of the whiteboard, a YouTube explainer your teacher recommended.
Turn it into something to actually do
Cue cards, quizzes, practice questions, condensed notes, mind maps and podcasts — all generated from the material you uploaded, not from a template.
Test yourself, then check the source
Every answer cites the part of your material it came from, so when something looks wrong you can go straight to the page and check rather than trusting it.
Built around how the HSC actually runs
Half your mark is decided at school, across a year most people underestimate.
Year 11, already in Year 12
At most NSW schools the Year 12 course — and the assessment program that counts — starts in Term 4 of Year 11. The tasks begin about a year before the exams do.
Trials in Term 3
Trials are usually the heaviest single task in your school's assessment program. NESA does not mark them; your teachers do. Which makes them the best diagnostic you will get.
Extension courses
Extension courses are one unit each and reward depth over coverage. The useful revision is worked problems and explanation, not another summary of the notes.
The course where your rank is slipping
Moderation adjusts your school's marks against the exam but preserves the rank order. Where you sit relative to your class is doing more work than most students realise.
How the HSC actually works, and why it changes how you revise
Your mark in each HSC course is a 50:50 combination of your school-based assessment mark and your mark in the external HSC exam that NESA sets. That means half your result is already being decided in classrooms, across a program of assessment tasks that most NSW schools begin in Term 4 of Year 11. Your school submits its assessment marks as a rank order, and NESA then moderates those marks against how your cohort performs in the external exam — a process that adjusts the marks but preserves the ranks. The practical consequence is that where you sit relative to the people in your class is doing a great deal of work, and it is being set long before the exam timetable comes out. Revision that only starts in September is revision for half of the mark.
The syllabus is the contract, and you have to read it yourself
Every NSW course has a NESA syllabus, and its dot points define what you can actually be examined on. The students who do well tend to treat those dot points as a checklist: for each one, can I explain this, and can I write about it under time pressure? Scholarly will not give you NESA's syllabus text, past papers or marking guidelines — that material is NESA's copyright and it is already free on their site. What Scholarly does instead is take your copy of the syllabus, your class notes and your textbook chapter, and build cue cards and practice questions that walk the dot points one at a time. The questions come out of your course rather than a generic version of it.
Trials are a mock, an assessment task and a diagnostic at once
Trial exams usually land in Term 3 of Year 12, and in most schools they are the heaviest single task in the internal assessment program. They are set and marked by your teachers rather than by NESA, which is exactly what makes them useful: the mistakes you make in trials are the mistakes you will make in the HSC, unless you do something about them in the weeks in between. The productive move afterwards is to keep your marked paper and sort your errors into two piles — content you did not know, and technique you did not execute. Then rebuild your cue cards and practice questions around the content pile. Re-reading the notes that already failed you once is not a plan.
Active recall beats re-reading, and cue cards are how you get it
Re-reading a set of notes produces a strong feeling of familiarity and very little durable recall. Testing yourself on the same material — trying to retrieve it, failing, and only then checking — is far more effective, and it is one of the most consistently supported findings in learning research. The reason students do not do it is admin: making a hundred good cue cards from a chapter is tedious work, and most people quit somewhere around card twenty. Upload the chapter, the lesson recording, or your own notes, and Scholarly writes the cards, the quiz and the practice questions for you, each one citing the part of your material it was drawn from. What you get back is not a generic HSC deck. It is your course, asked back at you.
Where the ATAR fits, and why we will not guess at yours
The ATAR is not an HSC mark, and NESA does not calculate it. UAC does, from your scaled marks: your best two units of English plus your next best eight units, added into an aggregate and ranked against the rest of the state's cohort. Scaling is the part everybody wants a number for, and it is precisely the part nobody can honestly give you in advance — how a course scales depends on the whole cohort that sat it in that particular year, and UAC publishes the scaling report only after the results are in. So there is no ATAR estimator on this page, and there will not be one: any figure we produced would be a guess wearing the costume of a calculation. Put your effort into the marks you can move, which are your assessment ranks and your exam performance, and let UAC do the arithmetic in December.
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HSC revision questions
Can Scholarly give me HSC past papers or marking guidelines?
No. NESA's past papers, marking guidelines and syllabus text are NESA's copyright, and they are already free on the NESA site — we do not republish them. Scholarly does the opposite thing: you upload your own notes, your own textbook chapter, or a recording of your own lesson, and it generates new cue cards, quizzes and practice questions from that material.
Do you have an official HSC question bank?
No, and you should be sceptical of anyone who says they do. There is no official bank of HSC questions outside the exams NESA itself publishes. Scholarly is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to NESA or UAC. Everything you get back is generated from material you upload yourself.
Can you estimate my ATAR?
No, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The ATAR is calculated by UAC, not by NESA and certainly not by us, and it depends on scaling that reflects how the entire cohort in each course performed in that year. UAC publishes those figures after the results come out; nobody can honestly produce them beforehand. An invented ATAR is worse than no ATAR, so we would rather tell you to check UAC than sell you a number.
When should I start revising for the HSC?
Earlier than feels reasonable, because half of each course mark is internal and most NSW schools begin the Year 12 assessment program in Term 4 of Year 11. In practice the tasks that count start roughly a year before the exams. Spacing your revision so each topic comes back around several times beats one heroic block in the Term 3 holidays.
How should I revise for trials?
Treat trials as the dress rehearsal they are: they are usually the heaviest internal task, and they are marked by your school rather than by NESA. Work from your own material — your notes, the chapter, the questions your teacher set — and test yourself under time rather than re-reading. Afterwards, keep the marked paper. It tells you exactly what to rebuild your cue cards around before the HSC.
Does it work for extension courses and maths?
Yes. Extension courses are one unit each and reward depth rather than coverage, so the revision that pays is worked problems and being able to explain your reasoning. Upload your worked solutions, your notes, and the harder problems you got wrong, and generate fresh practice questions and step-by-step explanations from them.
Can I use a recording of my lesson?
Yes, as long as you have permission to record it. Upload the recording and Scholarly turns it into notes, cue cards and a summary you can revise from, with each point tied back to the part of the recording it came from. Missing a lesson is the single most common reason students upload one.
Is what I upload private?
Everything Scholarly makes is built from material you upload yourself. Scholarly is not a note-sharing site. Nothing you upload is published to other students, added to a public library, or made searchable by anyone else — your workspace is yours, and that is the core difference from note-sharing platforms. For the full detail of how Scholarly handles uploaded content, including data use and retention, read our privacy policy.
Stop re-reading. Start being asked.
Upload the chapter, the notes, or the lesson you missed. Get cue cards, quizzes and practice questions built from your own HSC material.
Free to start · No credit card required