WACE Psychology exam 2026Exam: Wed 28 Oct · SCSA timetable
Your WACE Psychology exam:
When and how long
- Psychology9.20 am start3 h plus 10 min reading time
SCSA: arrive 30 minutes before the examination start time. Every ATAR written exam has 10 minutes reading time and 3 hours working time unless otherwise indicated. The timetable is final, and no allowance is made for misreading it.
Source: 2026 Year 12 ATAR course written examinations timetable (SCSA), 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
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
WACE Psychology cram sheet
Key formulas, definitions and facts copied from our Psychology syllabus pages. One page when printed.
Unit 3: Memory and learning
Two people looking at the same stimulus with healthy sense organs receive, transduce and transmit very similar information. What differs between them is perception.
When attention is divided during learning, less information is transferred into short-term memory and it is processed less deeply, so less is later recalled. This is why studying with notifications on reduces what you remember.
These three features are what the syllabus names for every store, so learn them as a set of nine facts. A common short answer item gives you one feature and asks you to name the store.
Could not: form new explicit (declarative) long-term memories. Could: use short-term memory, recall many older memories, and learn new motor skills (implicit procedural memory). This pattern is the evidence for the hippocampus's role.
Unit 4: Motivation, wellbeing and health
Exam scenarios usually contain more than one source. Identify each source with the specific detail that shows it, rather than labelling the whole behaviour with a single source.
Controlling external rewards for an activity someone already enjoys can reduce intrinsic motivation, because the reward makes the behaviour feel controlled, which undermines autonomy. This is one reason token economies can stop working once rewards are removed.
The syllabus separates the 1954 hierarchy from the expanded 1970 hierarchy. The three additions are cognitive, aesthetic and transcendence needs.
Diener's model is about feeling good and being satisfied (often called hedonic wellbeing). Ryff's model is about functioning well, meaning and growth (often called eudaimonic wellbeing).