Can we learn anymore from another set of stellar Section B exam responses in 2025 than in 2024?

 

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.

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 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 reflect this emphasis. This is again the case in 2025 as it was in 2024.

The 16 stellar examples (going from page 16 to page 53 in the report) are in one sense very individual, as you would expect in the best of student work. But one can generalise to some extent about these examples, and the last two dot points above suggest what is being admired in and promoted by these examples. There is an analytical description of the 16 examples below (courtesy of ChatGPT) on which the following comments are based .

• Most of the exemplary pieces are some form of narrative, almost all use the first person, and the ‘voices’ are personal and reflective.
• There are no propositional responses to title, stimulus or Framework and there is little direct propositional content in most of the pieces. The pieces are ‘expressive’ or ‘poetic’ rather than propositional.
• In most cases the relationship of the responses to the title, stimulus and Framework is implied and must be inferred. In some cases the relationship to the set task seems slight.
• There is a focus on evocative and emotive narratives that commonly involve extended metaphors or symbols.
• There is a focus on form and language rather than content, and the forms are experimental and the language highly figurative rather than typical prose.
• As one would expect with a reflective approach, the purpose in some pieces is exploratory and indefinite.

The design of the exam task itself is problematic and the constraints that seem to be built into it don’t constrain these stellar students. In most cases the pieces have the appearance of preprepared approaches.

If the designers of this task expected that the inbuilt constraints would prevent or at least mitigate the unloading of preprepared essays, the stellar examples, the annotation of them and the discussion of enhancing characteristics in the exam report do not reflect the design of the task.

There is an incipient contradiction between the setup of the task and what is admired in these stellar examples. We are even told that it is an enhancing characteristic of responses that meaning (that is relationship to the title, the stimulus and the Framework) has to be inferred. This is tantamount to implying that there need (or should?) be no direct reference to the title, the stimulus and the Framework. It would seem to be implied that a direct response to the set task would be un-strategic and disadvantageous.

Is the report stating that it is best for student to imply links to the title and a stimulus?

It seems dangerous for most students to try to deal with the set task through implied meaning. Such an approach makes great demands of the subtlety of the students and puts significant pressure on the markers to make uncertain inferences about dealing with the set task, preprepared answers and plagiarism.

While is admirable that students can choose what they do (to some extent) in this section of the exam, it seems there are some expectations in the marking about what student should choose to do. It looks as though this task is envisaged in operation as what is commonly thought of as ‘creative writing’. There is no reason for assuming that the exam task called Creating a text is the same as ‘creative writing’.

There is nothing in the exam task (or the study design) to prevent students responding to the set task in a propositional and persuasive fashion, but it would seem that the published examples, the annotations of them and the comments on enhancement in the exam report are discouraging a propositional response to the task.

This seems to me an inappropriate and unnecessary foreclosing of choice for students. Students who directly respond to the title and the stimulus would more clearly display and markers could more directly judge their response to the set task. There are no such pieces of writing in the examples of 2024 or 2025 that respond directly and propositionally to the set tasks.

 

What about a propositional approach to the Section B exam task?

After the report of 2024 there still seemed to be a number of uncertain issues about this part of the exam.

• How closely does an exam response have to be tied to the set title and a stimulus?
• Is the directness or tightness of the relationship of a student response part of the assessment?
• Is a response that is directly based on the stimulus, title and Framework stronger (other things being equal) than a response that loosely or indirectly based on these requirements?

• To what extent is Section B assessed as an exercise in producing a form or kind of language?
• And is there a premium in the assessment for evidently producing a particular form or kind of expressive writing?

The report of 2025 seems to imply some problematic responses to these uncertain issues.

According to the criteria and the Expected qualities, the answer to the first three questions would be that the first criterion supports the importance of the ‘relevance’ and the substance of the relationships of a response to the set title, stimulus and the Framework.

Section B of the exam will be assessed against the following criteria:

• use of relevant idea(s) drawn from one Framework of Ideas, the title provided and at least one piece of stimulus material;
• creation of a cohesive text that connects to a clear purpose(s) and incorporates an appropriate voice;
• use of suitable text structures and language features to create a text; and
• use of fluent expression, including the appropriate use of vocabulary

The Expected qualities for scores of 8 to 10 do not give us any indication of the relative importance of different characteristics of relevance, cohesion, voice, text structure and fluency.

It seems to me that propositional writing can more easily establish a direct and strong link to the title, stimulus and Framework than narrative writing, but it seems from the reports that the managers of the exam do not see any problems with the way stronger students are responding to the set task and they even encourage an indirect rather than a direct handling of the set task.

This approach leaves student and teachers uncertain about what linkage is sufficient to the set task. What happens in marking if there is little, implausible or no linkage to the set task?

Is the exam wide open to the unloading of preprepared or plagiarised responses?

A ChatGPT breakdown of the Section b exemplars of 2025

Topic	Content (What happens / explored)	Rhetorical Strategy	Voice
Country – title Origins
Migration and belonging across two countries	Narrator reflects on identity shaped by living between Istanbul and Melbourne, using rivers as symbols of connection and memory.	Reflective narrative; extended metaphor (rivers); sensory imagery; comparison between countries.	Thoughtful, confiding, reflective and philosophical.
Trauma and healing through connection to land	Narrator revisits a violent childhood event on rural land and gradually reconciles with country through returning and repairing the property.	Narrative reflection; symbolic motifs (mirror, scars); metaphor linking land and personal trauma.	Sombre, introspective, emotionally reflective.
Cultural identity and migration	Migrant narrator struggles with cultural displacement in Australia but reconnects with heritage through memories of grandmother and cooking kaya.	Personal narrative; dialogue; symbolism (hands, cooking); sensory imagery.	Warm, confiding, nostalgic and reflective.
Reconciliation with place of origin	Narrator leaves Tasmania for London but realises their emotional ties remain with their home landscape.	Reflective narrative journey; contrast between rural and urban places; recurring imagery of home.	Nostalgic, contemplative and reflective.

 

Topic	Content (What happens /explored)	Rhetorical Strategy	Voice
Protest – title Small Act Big Wins
Silence versus speaking out against injustice	A father recounts the exile of Kashmiri Pandits and recognises that telling stories of oppression becomes a form of protest.	Personal testimony; historical narrative; repetition of a key date; metaphor (silence, hammer).	Reflective, solemn and morally persuasive.
Protest as a force for social change	Protest is personified as a dating profile seeking partners willing to challenge injustice.	Extended metaphor; personification; satire; direct address to reader.	Playful, confident, engaging and persuasive.
Symbolic power of protest actions	Analytical discussion of a famous photograph showing a woman striking a neo-Nazi marcher with her handbag, arguing that small acts inspire wider resistance.	Analytical essay; visual analysis; historical examples; repetition of the title phrase.	Informative, analytical, reflective.
Collective protest and activism	Feature article advocating activism through an NGO, arguing that individual protest actions lead to large social change.	Persuasive article; repeated metaphor (birdcage); historical examples; rhetorical questions and appeals.	Assertive, motivational, activist and persuasive.

 

Topic	Content (What happens / explored)	Rhetorical Strategy	Voice
Personal Journeys – title Changing Direction
Changing sibling relationships	Narrator reflects on following an older sister in childhood, drifting apart in adolescence and reconnecting later.	Personal narrative; symbolism (origami boats and cranes); chronological reflection.	Intimate, confiding and reflective.
Emotional change through suffering	Narrator sitting in church reflects on anger and grief about a parent’s illness and slowly moves toward acceptance.	Interior monologue; second-person perspective; symbolic references to faith and direction.	Introspective, conflicted and contemplative.
Identity shaped by stories and language	The narrator reflects on how stories (symbolised by a recurring dragon motif) influence personal growth and agency, exploring how narratives shape choices and direction in life.	Reflective narrative; recurring metaphor (dragon); symbolic storytelling; exploration of narrative power.	Reflective, imaginative, contemplative.
Personal change through storytelling and self-understanding	The narrator reflects on the power of stories and language in shaping identity and life choices. A recurring metaphor (a dragon story) becomes a symbol for recognising agency and changing one’s life direction.	Reflective narrative; extended metaphor; recurring symbolic motif (dragon/story); figurative language used as a unifying device.	Reflective, imaginative, contemplative and hopeful.

 

Topic	Content (What happens / explored)	Rhetorical Strategy	Voice
Play – title Life Is A Game
Learning life lessons through performance and play	A student reflects on participating in theatre sports at school and how improvisation and play helped them confront anxiety and unpredictability in life.	Personal narrative; metaphor of games for life; humour and anecdote; repetition of winning/losing motifs.	Reflective, conversational, slightly humorous and self-aware.
Life lessons learned through sport	A speech-style reflection on a golfing career that uses the structure and lessons of golf to explain how to “play life successfully”.	Extended analogy between golf and life; speech format; structured reflection with examples and quotations.	Inspirational, instructive and reflective.
Authentic self-expression through play	A highly experimental text that critiques society’s rule-bound expectations and argues that true “play” means reclaiming individuality.	Experimental form; disruption of text layout; meta-commentary about writing and rules; philosophical reflection.	Defiant, reflective, self-conscious and rebellious.
Reclaiming individuality through play	A philosophical and experimental piece that argues society forces people into rigid roles (“players” in a game). The narrator rejects these rules and advocates reclaiming authentic self-expression through playful living.	Experimental form; meta-commentary about writing and rules; disrupted layout; extended metaphor of games and light/spectrum; rhetorical questioning.	Defiant, philosophical, rebellious and introspective.