About the VCAA – what you need to know

Readers of this blog may already know about the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA). If you don’t know much about this organisation, then now is the time to learn about what they do and how it affects you.

For students using VCE® Exam results as part of a pathway into medicine or dentistry, VCAA planning may sit alongside admissions-test planning. If that applies to you, start by understanding what the UCAT is and how it fits with Year 12 timelines.

The VCAA is a crucial part of your Year 11 and 12 experience because their staff write the questions and mark your external exams. More broadly, the VCAA advises your school as to how they should teach their subjects throughout the academic year. That means what the VCAA says greatly impacts the assessment criteria your teachers use when deciding what grade to award for internal assessments.

The VCAA board reports directly to the Minister for Education in Victoria. This means their curriculum is shaped in consultation with politicians and thus takes into account community expectations and values (since politicians are supposed to represent those who voted for them). So keep this in mind when trying to predict possible questions, especially for subjects like Economics, International Politics and English, where contemporary events in the news are pertinent.

Here are three things the VCAA can offer you:

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. That same principle—using official or exam-style material before less targeted questions—also applies to admissions-test study, where free UCAT resources can be a sensible starting point.

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. Students aiming for undergraduate medicine should also remember that school results are only one part of selection, with many courses considering UCAT requirements for medicine as well.

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 you 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.

Once your VCE® Exam schedule is clear, you can also map out UCAT preparation around SACs and exams so the two study loads do not compete unnecessarily.