What do you think of the new Section B sample exam tasks?

I was uncertain about what to make of the Creating texts of the new English/EAL study design, and was waiting to see the sample exam. When the sample tasks were released in December 2023, I was initially a bit uneasy, but as I began to write a study guide for BBE on the sample tasks I became more and more positively disposed towards the task design and the area of study.

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I don't know of any rationale has been offered for the design, but as an experienced assessment specialist I would be happy to write one. This is the rubric for the task:

Framework #: Writing about [Country, Protest, Personal journeys, Play]

Write a text that explores ideas about [Country, Protest, Personal journeys, Play].

You must use the title provided.

You must use at least one of the following stimuli.

In the exam students are given a title for their piece of writing and are then required to use one of three pieces the stimulus offered for the Framework in their response.

The exam task is structured to make it hard for students to unload a previous essay (or a plagiarised piece) on the title. The set response title and the requirement to use the stimulus means that students must deal with the requirements of a particular version of the task. One presumes responses will be downgraded if they only relate loosely to the title and the stimulus or appear to be a preprepared or learned response. These can be subtle but reasonable judgements for markers to make. A culture must be developed among the markers for making such judgements and that understanding must be communicated to students and teachers. This challenge will be a new adventure for the English examiners given the current opacity of VCAA English assessment processes.

The task design means that while students might hope to be able to use material prepared during the year in some way, they must only use material that is related to and appropriate to the title and the selected stimulus. They must leave aside material that is not relevant to the set title or a piece of stimulus, and they must tailor relevant ideas to the specific title and stimulus. Fair enough. A good trade-off for the otherwise open nature of the task.

This design means that students have studied the broad topic (the Framework) during the year, but they are constrained in the exam response by a specific title and the requirement to use one of three pieces of stimulus. It is significant that students are not required to use the mentor texts in any way in the exam.

The sample tasks show that there is a pattern to the stimulus.

The first is a proposition.

The second is an image.

The third is a kind of poetic expression.

In my view this is a good task design because:

• students will have thought in general terms about the broad topic they are to write about;
• it allows students a good deal of choice about what they write and how;
• the student's ability to generate a kind of response becomes part of the assessment; and
• it is an open task that sets up constraints that guard against the unloading of preprepared or plagiarised material.

There are some problems with this task design of course.

The responses are going to be very diverse, and this is a challenge for the markers.

It is difficult enough for markers to deal with very constrained tasks (such as the GAT Part A of 2022) in which much is the same in many student responses. This challenge is probably why the GAT Part A of 2023 was made into an 'opinion' rather than an expository task. When markers find students are going in many different directions, they find it hard to get a sense of the possibilities of the task because the possibilities seem endless.

But the more difficult issue for both students and markers is the degree of looseness or tightness with which the constraints will be operated.

How tightly is the use of the set title and the required use of a stimulus going to be interpreted?

What happens if students give only nominal reference to the title and a stimulus?

How will markers be directed to treat merely nominal references to the title and stimulus?

We can at least hope that the examiner's report will give some interpretation of these issues for teachers and students. With similar issues in the GAT writing, we get no interpretation of expectations because there is no examiner's report for the GAT. This lack of feedback from the GAT is most unsatisfactory.

It is not only the implementation of the task design that will be challenging, the writing of the test tasks will be very difficult. It will be difficult to get something like equal difficulty for the titles and stimuli of the different Frameworks. In writing 10 sets of tasks for each Framework for publication by BBE I found it very difficult to get comparability between different Frameworks and within Frameworks in different versions.

I have worked the sample task very carefully for the BBE Section B Study Guide, and I think the tasks for different Frameworks are substantially different in difficulty. At the simplest or most basic level the title of 'This is me' for Personal journeys is much easier that the title of 'Listen' for the Protest Framework. Comparability gets even more challenging when a stimulus has to be yoked to a title. There are substantial differences in the complexity of the possible relationships (or lack of relationship) between the different titles and stimuli.

I have come to the conclusion that the potential problems with any version of these tasks means I would prepare students for two Frameworks to give them more choice so they can avoid a title and stimulus that they (and I) find disabling. I would also use mentor texts from different Frameworks for my chosen Frameworks. The relationship of the texts to the Frameworks is so loose that students could gain things from texts without working off the Framework. I would certainly want students to read the pieces by Amy Duong, Mark Gillespie and Tim Winton (from three different Frameworks) whatever Framework I was doing. Some of the other mentor texts don't seem of much value to me. At least most of the texts are quite brief. Students could read them all.

If markers, students and teachers are given nuanced guidance on these matters, and the challenges are embraced by the examiners, the exciting potential of this area of study and the exam task will be realised.

There has recently been discussion about the increased workload caused by the design of the SAC for this Area of study. It will be interesting to see if and how these concerns are addressed by VCAA. We would welcome discussion about how people are managing these demands.