How to Prepare for a Student Competition

The single most common cause of a disappointing result is not a lack of ability; it is a misread brief. A student pours effort into an excellent piece of work that answers a slightly different question than the one that was asked, and loses marks they never needed to lose. So the very first act of preparation, before any studying or creating, is to read the brief slowly, more than once, and make sure you understand every word of it. What exactly is being asked? What are the constraints — the word limit, the format, the theme, the deadline? What is explicitly required, and what is merely optional? Write these down in your own words. If anything is unclear, re-read the competition page, because it is the final authority.

Then turn to the rubric — the published breakdown of how your work will be scored — and treat it as your map. The rubric tells you precisely what the judges reward and how much each element is worth. If originality carries thirty per cent and presentation carries five, you now know where to spend your energy and where a little is enough. Preparing against the rubric is not gaming the system; it is simply understanding what excellence looks like for this particular challenge. Print it out, keep it beside you throughout, and check your work against it at every stage.

This phase takes half an hour and saves you from the most expensive mistakes there are. A student who deeply understands the brief and the rubric before they begin is already ahead of most of the field — not because they are cleverer, but because they know exactly what they are aiming at while others are still guessing.

This is the phase most people think of as ‘preparation’: the studying, the practising, the building of whatever knowledge or skill the competition demands. How you spend this time matters enormously, because effort applied badly produces far less than effort applied well. The golden rule is to practise actively, not passively. Re-reading notes and watching explanations feels productive but builds only a shallow, fragile familiarity. What builds durable ability is retrieval and application: testing yourself, solving problems, producing work, and getting feedback — struggling a little, because the struggle is where the learning happens.

Practise under conditions as close as possible to the real thing. If the competition is a timed quiz, do timed practice, not leisurely review, so that you train your composure and pacing along with your knowledge. If it is a submission, produce full practice pieces rather than fragments, so you experience the whole process of making something complete. This kind of realistic rehearsal does something ordinary study cannot: it prepares you not just to know the material but to perform with it under the specific pressures of the actual event. Our Resources are built to support exactly this kind of active, targeted practice.

Be strategic about where you focus. The rubric already told you where the marks are; your practice should follow the marks. It is tempting to spend time on the parts you already enjoy and are good at, but the biggest gains almost always come from honestly identifying your weakest area and deliberately working on it. Growth lives at the edge of your comfort, not in the middle of it. A student who spends their preparation strengthening their weaknesses, rather than polishing their strengths, arrives at the competition far more complete.

With your work substantially done and your buffer day arrived, the task shifts from creating to refining. This final phase is where careless students throw away marks they had already earned, and where careful students quietly pull ahead. Go back to the brief and the rubric one last time and check, point by point, that you have done everything asked and answered exactly what was set. It is heartbreakingly common to produce excellent work that overlooks a stated requirement — a word limit exceeded, a format not followed, an element of the brief simply forgotten. Catch these now, while you still can.

Then polish the details. Read written work aloud to catch the awkward sentences your eye glides over. Check a design at full size and in the format it will be judged in. Proofread for the small errors — the typo, the mislabelled file, the missing detail — that signal carelessness and cost easy presentation marks. None of this is glamorous, but the difference between work that feels finished and work that feels rushed is almost entirely in this final layer of care. Judges notice it, even when they cannot name it, and the rubric usually rewards it directly.

Finally, submit with room to spare. Confirm the exact format required and match it precisely. Upload well before the deadline, not at it, so that a slow connection or a technical glitch cannot undo weeks of work in the final minutes. Once submitted, check your confirmation and then — genuinely — let it go. You have done the work; the result is now out of your hands, and worrying about it changes nothing. The discipline of submitting early and then releasing the outcome is itself a mark of a seasoned competitor.

It is worth studying failure directly, because the same handful of mistakes account for the great majority of disappointing results — and every one of them is avoidable. The first and most common is not reading the brief carefully, and answering a slightly different question than the one asked. The second is leaving everything to the last minute, which removes any chance to iterate, review, or absorb the inevitable setback. The third is ignoring the rubric and pouring effort into elements the judges barely reward while neglecting the ones that carry the most marks.

Others are subtler but just as costly. Never testing under realistic conditions leaves a well-prepared student unravelled by the pressure of the real thing. Adding instead of editing produces bloated work that buries a good idea under unnecessary weight. Polishing strengths while ignoring weaknesses caps a student’s score exactly where they are weakest. And submitting at the deadline rather than before it hands the outcome to chance, letting a technical glitch or a slow connection undo weeks of genuine effort in the final minutes.

Notice that not one of these mistakes is about ability. They are all about process — about how a student approaches the task rather than how talented they are. That is genuinely good news, because process is entirely within your control. A student of ordinary ability with an excellent process routinely outperforms a more gifted one with a careless approach. Read this list before every competition, and simply refusing to make these mistakes will place you ahead of much of the field before you have written a single word.

Preparation does not happen in a vacuum; it happens in a place, at a time, surrounded by whatever you have allowed into the room. Getting these conditions right removes a surprising amount of friction. Find a spot where you can focus without interruption, even if it is only a corner of a table for an hour at a time. Put the phone out of reach rather than merely face-down, because the mere presence of a notification-capable device measurably fragments attention. The goal is not a perfect study; it is a space where your mind can settle into the work without a fight.

Gather your tools before you begin a session, not during it. Keep the brief and the printed rubric beside you at all times — they are your compass, and glancing at them constantly keeps you honest about what you are aiming for. Have your practice materials, your drafts, and whatever the task requires within reach, so that starting is effortless and you never lose momentum hunting for something. A little setup at the start of each session pays for itself many times over in focus.

Pay attention, too, to when you work best. Most people have a window in the day when their mind is naturally sharpest — for many students it is the morning, for others the evening — and it is worth protecting that window for your hardest preparation, leaving lighter review for your lower-energy times. Working with your natural rhythm rather than against it means the same hour of effort produces noticeably more. Small, consistent sessions in your best window will carry you further than occasional marathons in your worst.