Doug McCurry and VCE English

  The Section B examples in the VCE English exam reports of 2024 and 2025 March 23, 2026 by Doug McCurry I claimed in a previous blog that there was little commentary in the report of 2024 about the difficult issues in preparing for this new and complicated task. I also claimed that we could learn little from the published examples that would have any meaning for two thirds of students. The same is true of the sixteen stellar responses offered in the report of 2025.  Offering the same sort of material and annotations again in 2025 provokes some more specific analysis. The 2025 report is an improvement on 2024 in offering the following comments on quality. These comments would seem to give priority to the set task and the Framework rather than the ‘linguistic features’ of text structure, language, vocabulary and voice. This suggests an appropriate emphasis on content in the assessment rather than form or language but the stellar examples (and the commentary on them) do not...

  Are the Section B exam tasks going to differ in 2025? June 11, 2025 by Doug McCurry The VCAA seems to be trying to improve communication about the mysteries of the examination process by adding a presentation by the Chief Assessor to the English assessment pages of the website. Information is much needed by teachers and students on VCAA assessment processes, and one hopes to see more such information in the future. h ttps://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/assessment/vce/examination-specifications-past-examinations-and-examination-reports/english The most significant piece of information in the presentation is the following hint about a change in the format of the Section B task in 2025. It's tempting to assume that the format of the 2024 exam will be the format for future years, and it may be, but it's worth using the exam specifications when designing practise examination material for students. The exam specifications do not specify that there must be three pieces of stimulus materi...

  T he challenges of the first VCAA English Section B exam task November 27, 2024 by Doug McCurry The puzzles of connection Section B of VCE English is designed so that there is a content for students to prepare and write about in the exam and for teachers to teach. The exam task is designed to mitigate preprepared and/or plagiarised responses. This task design poses many challenges to students and markers which I will examine on the basis of the first set of tasks presented in 2024. I will consider the following issues about exam responses. What is the relationship beteen the Framework, the title and the stimulus? How close is the relationship between the Framework, title and stimulus supposed to be in a student’s response? Can the title be taken to be the Framework? Is the title more important than the stimulus or vice versa? Can the title and stimulus be taken as the constraints without the content of the response relating to the Framework? What happens if the connect...

  Moderating with Moderation November 11, 2024 by Doug McCurry  What is under the school’s control? It was disturbing to read the concerns about the recent VATE Crafting/Creating Texts Survey Report. Great concerns were expressed about the increased workload of the new AoS that seemed to drown out the celebration of this change one would have expected. There is an increase in the number of SACs from one to two (with a reflective comment) for the new AoS, but it should be noted that the amount of teacher and student work involved is work largely up to the school. The terms and tenor of this SAC can be made bigger or smaller by the school. The conditions of the writing and the number of drafts (if any) for the two Section B tasks is under the control of the school. Replacing two texts as the examined substance of Section B with four brief mentor texts in the new AoS is certainly a reduction of work. The mentor texts can be dealt with very expeditiously, unlike the attentio...

  How would we best prepare students for VCE Section A questions? October 26, 2025 by Doug McCurry  According to the Executive Examiner for VCE English, there are four kinds of Section A questions: propositional, quotation, direct and hybrid. We were originally told that there would be no questions about single characters in the new course, but that seems to have been extended into there being no named characters in questions. The author is resurrected in current questions, but characters are buried. It also seems that there are to be no references in questions to incidents, plot or setting. One wonders at the rationale for this peculiar approach to a text list that is 75% fiction. The propositions and the questions of the 2024 English exam seem to be based on what the examining panel would see as ‘concepts’, and by that they mean what is usually referred to as themes. The questions of 2024 were based on themes rather than characters or plot. (Themes disappeared from Section...

  What can we infer from the Section B examples in the exam report? June 6, 2025 by Doug McCurry It is praiseworthy that the exam report offered nine full examples of Section B responses. There are also some 2400 words annotating these scripts, but there is almost no commentary on the performance of students in general or on the challenging issues in the task design. There are many open and difficult questions about this new and unfamiliar task, and there is no discussion of these challenging issues in the exam report. Even more than usual, it seems the only way you can find out how the task is being marked is to be a marker. Given the unfamiliarity of this task, it is even more than usually unsatisfactory that there is no information about how the responses are marked or feedback from the marking. The Executive Examiner has stated in a presentation on the website that the examples ‘explain how the Expected Qualities were applied by the examiners’. The annotations tell us in a ...

  Are the Section B exam tasks going to differ in 2025? June 11, 2025 by Doug McCurry The VCAA seems to be trying to improve communication about the mysteries of the examination process by adding a presentation by the Chief Assessor to the English assessment pages of the website. Information is much needed by teachers and students on VCAA assessment processes, and one hopes to see more such information in the future. https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/assessment/vce/examination-specifications-past-examinations-and-examination-reports/english The most significant piece of information in the presentation is the following hint about a change in the format of the Section B task in 2025. It's tempting to assume that the format of the 2024 exam will be the format for future years, and it may be, but it's worth using the exam specifications when designing practise examination material for students. The exam specifications do not specify that there must be three pieces of stimulus materia...

  T he challenges of the first VCAA English Section B exam task November 27, 2024 by Doug McCurry The puzzles of connection Section B of VCE English is designed so that there is a content for students to prepare and write about in the exam and for teachers to teach. The exam task is designed to mitigate preprepared and/or plagiarised responses. This task design poses many challenges to students and markers which I will examine on the basis of the first set of tasks presented in 2024. I will consider the following issues about exam responses. What is the relationship beteen the Framework, the title and the stimulus? How close is the relationship between the Framework, title and stimulus supposed to be in a student’s response? Can the title be taken to be the Framework? Is the title more important than the stimulus or vice versa? Can the title and stimulus be taken as the constraints without the content of the response relating to the Framework? What happens if the connect...