Originally posted by !meeee!
that's true. a lot of my friends found doing practice essays made them slack off by the time they got to doing the trials cause they were over confident. i guess whatever works for you
I agree with this. I wasn't expecting to get band 6 for Advanced. I think it's more important to maintain interest in a subject, as opposed to knowing it back to front. Instead of writing heaps of practise essays on the same question, do answers to a variety of different questions to get you thinking about broader issues, rather than making your mind dead by desensitising it to the thinking part by over-stressing about memorising everything.
Also, page numbers are the
very last thing you should be stressing about! Not only is it completely dependent on the nature of your own writing (as !meeee! said, 7-8 pages is quite enough to get you in the top band), it's also that the pages are smaller (B5 due to margin), the lines are more widely spaced, and the paper is easier to write on!
I was a slow writer, and I could only manage about 4 pages in 40 minutes on normal lines paper, but I wrote 15 in 55 minutes for my Area of Study essay in the HSC, which was about 3 pages typed. That should give you a fair idea of how much less you can actually fit on a page.