3 Gifts from the VCAA

1. VCE® Exam Practice exams (Past exam papers)

If you’re sitting down to do a practice exam under timed conditions and you need source material, the best place to go is the VCAA website, which contains VCE® Exam practice exams papers from previous years (with solutions!). Go to this official source before you do any mock questions from anyone else because it is always better to attempt questions that appeared on actual exams rather than made-up questions that may or may not be useful.

What part of the website should you go to find VCE® Exam practice exams? Currently, you can navigate from the homepage at vcaa.vic.edu.au to ‘Students’ → ‘Past VCE® Exam Examination and Examination Reports’ and then scroll down to the required subject and click on it. Once you’re on the relevant subject page, you will see a heading titled ‘Past Exams and Examination Reports’. Underneath that you will find previous VCE® Exam exams for each year, along with the Chief Examiner’s solution guide, which also contains helpful tips. Remember to primarily look at exam papers that are based on the current study design, since the exam format and content occasionally changes and older VCE® Exam papers may be irrelevant. Once you’ve run out of VCE® Exam practice exams for the current study design, you can of course use older papers.

2. VCE® Exam Assessment criteria

The same part of the website also contains valuable ‘assessment criteria’ that examiners use to judge whether your answers are deserving of high marks. Knowing the standards expected of students is essential for improving and the criteria should be central to planning your VCE® Exam preparation game plan. For example, on the English exam, in the text response section, one of the criteria is “controlled use of expressive and effective language appropriate to the task”. By knowing this, you can focus specifically on improving your vocabulary so it is cogent, precise and coherent.

3. Study designs

Quite apart from practice exam papers and assessment criteria, there is the holy grail of mastering a subject: the study design itself. This is also found on the VCAA website. Simply click on ‘Students’ then ‘VCE® Exam Courses (Study Designs)’. Everyone should print out or download to their computer, iPad or phone (or some other such thing) the official study design for their VCE® Exam subjects. This will tell you, usually in dot point form, exactly what topics you need to review. By looking over the study design, you can ensure you haven’t missed anything important in your VCE® Exam preparation.

With these three components, you’ll be well on your way to appreciating what examiners want. Of course, if want to save yourself the trouble of having to do all that research yourself or want to have more VCE® Exam practice exams than are available on the VCAA website, you can also fork out for a good VCE® Exam tutor or VCE® Exam preparation course.