SACE Psychology exam 2026Exam: Wed 4 Nov · SACE Board timetable
Your SACE Psychology exam:
When and how long
- Psychology1.30 pm start2 h 10 min
SACE Board: morning exams start at 9 am and afternoon exams at 1.30 pm, South Australian time (8 am and 12.30 pm in the Northern Territory). Some subjects have additional time for reading only; schools get day-by-day instructions at the start of Term 4. Language exams run earlier in October.
Source: SACE examinations timetable 2026 (SACE Board), checked Wednesday 23 September 2026. Where a start time, reading time or duration isn't shown, the timetable doesn't publish it: check your personal timetable and the front of your paper.
What the exam covers
We don't have past-paper frequency data for this exam, so here is the course, module by module. Make sure every module is covered.
Night-before and exam-morning checklists
The night before
- Morning exams start at 9 am and afternoon exams at 1.30 pm, South Australian time.[1]
- Some subjects have extra time for reading only: check the day-by-day instructions your school gets at the start of Term 4.[1]
- Some exams are electronic: check with your school how yours runs.[1]
- Pack your equipment the night before, set two alarms and sleep.[2]
Exam-week survival kit: The last 7 days · The night before and exam morning · What to bring, and what's banned · How to use reading time · If you're sick or something goes wrong · Handling exam-week stress.
Last-week revision
SACE Psychology cram sheet
Key formulas, definitions and facts copied from our Psychology syllabus pages. One page when printed.
Topic 1: Psychology of the Individual
IQ scores are scaled to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of about 15, forming a bell-shaped normal distribution. This means most people cluster near the average and very high or very low scores are rare.
Topic 2: Psychological Health and Wellbeing
Mental health and mental disorder are not a simple either-or. People move along a continuum over time, and good mental health means functioning and coping, not merely the absence of diagnosis.
Because stress depends on cognitive appraisal, the same situation is not equally stressful for everyone. How threatening an event feels, and whether a person believes they can cope, determines the stress response.
Cognitive behavioural therapy targets the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviour. It has strong research support for depression and anxiety and is recommended as a first-line psychological treatment in clinical guidelines.
Topic 3: Organisational Psychology
When individual effort is hidden inside a group total, people often work less hard than they would alone. Making each person's contribution identifiable and accountable reduces social loafing.
Herzberg argued that the things that stop people being unhappy (hygiene factors) are different from the things that actively motivate them (motivators). Removing dissatisfaction is not the same as creating satisfaction.
Topic 4: Social Influence
Normative influence is conforming to fit in and be liked; informational influence is conforming because you think others know better. Asch's clear, unambiguous task shows mostly normative influence.
When behaviour and attitude conflict, the resulting discomfort often pushes people to change the attitude to match the behaviour, rather than the other way around. This is why getting someone to act first can change how they think.
Social identity theory shows that simply dividing people into groups, even on a trivial basis, is enough to produce favouritism towards one's own group and bias against the other.
Topic 5: The Psychology of Learning
A neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus only after being repeatedly paired with an unconditioned stimulus. The learned response (CR) is essentially the same reflex as the UCR, now triggered by a new cue.
Attention, Retention, Reproduction and Motivation. All four are needed: a person can attend to, remember and be able to copy a behaviour, yet still not perform it without motivation.
Reinforcement always increases behaviour; punishment always decreases it. "Positive" and "negative" mean adding or removing a stimulus, not good or bad. Negative reinforcement is not punishment: it increases behaviour by removing something unpleasant.