Sharing your notes and resources

At the risk of sounding unbearably corny, the story of people debating whether or not to share their precious stuff is one as old as time. Even cavemen scavenging for food had the debate about whether sharing precious resources is the way to go.

But at the risk of stoking the fire, it’s time to end the myth that sharing notes and resources is either unfair or bad for you. Maybe when you’re scraping for food to survive, sharing… is probably not your best choice of action. But it’s a decent strategy in the HSC.

At Atomi, we think that nothing is more useful to you on your HSC quest than being collaborative and sharing your notes and resources.

Here’s why:

1. All for one, one for all!

The three musketeers had it right - even though you might not know it, your HSC is a team sport. So apart from feeling like a great person for helping a friend in need, sharing your resources actually helps your ATAR as well.

Although it sounds super counterintuitive, the reason sharing works is because of a little thing called “scaling.” Now I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of how scaling works, but your HSC marks actually go up and down depending on how well your year group does as whole, not just you individually.

So if your school does really well in the HSC, your internal mark gets pulled up by its bootstraps. Long story short, the better your cohort does, the better you’ll go, no matter what your rank is. So if you have a few gun students in your year but also have a massive tail of people that aren’t doing so well, the top people get affected too.

Lone-gunning your way is also a bit of a risk – since if you choke on the day and don’t do as well as you thought, you’ll need other people’s marks to help you stay on top.

So the best thing you can do is make sure everyone in your year does well. We actually focused on this in our school. The top guys for each subject got together and made a set of notes, practice responses and essay plans and printed off a copy for every single person in the year. That way, the lower guys had awesome resources to help them out and the top guys benefited from a good scaling year group.

So a word to the wise, sharing makes everyone do better. Get on it!

2. A little competition never hurt anyone

Real talk - most people don’t share notes to be nice or to boost their year’s marks. Usually, people share notes just to show off how good they are. Everyone wants to look the best and have the best resources. This can be a good thing, for two reasons:

1. When you and your mates start trading notes and essays, you start learning where all the gaps in your knowledge are. Like we’ve told you before, knowing what you don’t know is sometimes just as important as knowing what you do know. Friendly competition guarantees that you’ll fix the gaps in your notes quick smart if they are the worst in the group.
2. This works the other way too: you’re going to be rigorously going through your notes with a fine tooth comb to make sure they’re complete AF before you show them to the world. After all, how can you show off if your notes aren’t really the best?

There’s nothing wrong with a little competition and self-pride, use it to make sure your notes are on point.

3. Sharing is caring

We’ve all heard it before - ‘there’s no I in TEAM!’ and you have to be a team player. But deep down we know that sharing is caring.

Think about it like this. Everyone in your year has been together since year 7 and now you’re all going through this massively stressful, intense, high pressure year. We’ve all been in a position where it’s all just too much and we’re freaking out the day before an assessment, wishing for a lifeline. Finally, a mate shoots through their notes or practice essay or maths working...and you’re saved.

Look, I’m not saying you have to go out of your way to be the good samaritan all the time, but if a person is battling and they pop up to you for a bit of HSC love, sharing those notes the day before their Trial exam could be the difference between them making their degree, and not. And let’s be honest, that’s a pretty neat thing to do.

We even grilled the Atomi team just to confirm our suspicions and it was a universal consensus: Sharing really is caring.

Some things are bigger than the pride of keeping those super sweet highly formatted notes to yourself. After all, everyone is in the same boat for this one, so help a brother out.

P.S. and who knows, you might get some awesome karma points for being an absolute legend.