Leongatha Secondary Students had a sigh of relief after undertaking their English exam today as they prepare for more exams tomorrow and the coming weeks.
Students were remarkably calm following the exam, with some of them noting they were fortunately well prepared.
Here’s what some of them had to say:
Alicia Prentice
“We did a practice exam and that helped a lot of us, and we felt a bit more comfortable because we’d done it before. I wasn’t stressed because I practised for it. I did five pages for every section, and I had time to edit.”
Kyra McGrath
“It was good and it was similar to the practice one we did, so I just used knowledge from the year. The hardest part was trying to remember quotes and certain things about the novels.”
Nick Graham
“It was almost like the GAT, but a different atmosphere to the practice exam. I put in a lot of effort to give it my all and it was good experience I thought. I did alright. I was relaxed and slept in but got there in time.”
Tahlia Ebery
“I was stressing about it the night beforehand and then I got to it today and it didn’t seem so difficult, and I thought I know what I’m doing and I did practise enough, and all things going well I hope I get a good score. We had a trial exam in the middle of the year, so we had an idea of what we were going into.”
Section A requires students to write an analytical interpretation of a selected text in response to one topic (either i. or ii.) on one text.
Section B requires students to write a comparative analysis of a selected pair of texts in response to one topic (either i. or ii.) on one pair of texts.
Section C requires students to write an analysis of the ways in which argument and language are used to persuade others to share a point(s) of view.
The three sections were worth 20 marks each, total 60.
VCE English texts included the following:
Novels:
· Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart
· Arnott, Robbie, Flames
· Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice
· Doerr, Anthony, All the Light We Cannot See
· Erpenbeck, Jenny, Go, Went, Gone
· Jordan, Toni, Nine Days
· Mandel, Emily St. John, Station Eleven
· Piper, Christine, After Darkness
Short stories
· Kennedy, Cate, Like a House on Fire (A) (4)
· Stories for study: ‘Flexion’, ‘Ashes’, ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, ‘Tender’, ‘Like a House on Fire’, ‘Five-Dollar Family’, ‘Cross-country’, ‘Sleepers’, ‘Whirlpool’, ‘Cake’, ‘White Spirit’, ‘Little Plastic Shipwreck’, ‘Waiting’, ‘Static’, ‘Seventy-Two Derwents’
· Munro, Alice, Runaway
· Stories for study: All
Plays
· Euripides, The Women of Troy
· Rayson, Hannie, Extinction
· Shakespeare, William, Much Ado About Nothing
Poetry/songs
· Papertalk Greene, Charmaine and Kinsella, John, False Claims of Colonial Thieves
· Wordsworth, William, William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney
Multimodal texts
Films
· Hitchcock, Alfred (director), Rear Window
· Polley, Sarah (director), Stories We Tell
Other
· Satrapi, Marjane, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Jonathan Cape
Non-fiction texts
· Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood
· Laveau-Harvie, Vicki, The Erratics
Good luck to all year 12s for the remainder of the exam period !
