One Tip to Keep Examiners Engaged with your Essay

If there's one thing that helps raise marks, it's this- specificity.

What I mean by specificity is integrating specific information about the relevant text into your essay that shows the depth of knowledge you have. When it comes to year 12, you need to be incorporating far more than a discussion on characters and plot- you need to be including themes, literary devices, historians point of view and interpretations from literary critics. These are the elements that will allow your essay to stand out.

On average, there are roughly 40,000 students each year completing the year 12 English exam. That's 40,000 other text response essays, 40,000 comparative essays and 40,000 language analysis essays.

                              Keep the examiners engaged and excited to read your essay!

Make sure you give them a critical analysis of the text (or texts, in the case of comparative) to ensure that you can give yourself the best possible chance of achieving those high marks!

Click here to continue raising your marks!

By Bri

Do These 3 Things to Navigate VCE Successfully

 

Resilience. Resilience is; ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.’ This toughness is going to be the defining trait that gets you through not only your education, but your life. VCE is a challenging couple of years that involves numerous hurdles and constant effort. If you don’t have the ‘toughness’ required, then VCE is only going to become more challenging. Here are a few thoughts to increase your ‘toughness’ and your resilience:

Be realistically optimistic with your expectations

Allowing yourself to be realistically optimistic with your expectations is a key characteristic of resilience and it certainly applies when it comes to perseverance! We always take on a lot more than we can handle, whether it be wishful thinking or grand expectations, and this is just human nature. Don’t dream smaller, plan better.

Accept that you can’t control everything

In VCE and in your life, there will be either situations or people that you cannot control. You must accept that. Not all situations can be influenced the way we want, but the outcomes can be interpreted the way we want. You may receive negative feedback from a teacher one day, and you can either be frustrated or use that feedback to better your work and better yourself!

Plan for success

Your final years of high school are so important. So, plan for them to be. Plan to work hard! Plan to help your fellow students! Plan to do your best with all that you’ve been given! It’s so easy to get stuck into these final years and go through the motions, but the most effective student is the one who plans for success! Take your time, decide what it is you need to prioritise and put that at the forefront of your attention. The more you plan, the more confident you will be going into your SAC’s and your exams.

Perseverance

Perseverance = Stubbornness with a purpose

Throughout these final years of school, you are constantly going to face adversity. So, you must decide for yourself what you will do in the face of these challenges. Whether it be a tough SAC, a demanding assignment or just committing to weekly study, your decisions will have an impact on your end of year results.

Now, perseverance is your ability to; ‘keep doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.’ With that in mind, no matter how hard the work gets, or how demanding it is of your time, you will get back up and do it again! Because at the end of your VCE studies, all you want to remember is that you were resilient, you persevered and you got the results deserved. :)

 “Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.” - Newt Gingrich

By Shannon

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How to Be Organised in Year 12

Organisation is the key to success during Year 12. Of what can seem like a year filled with a myriad of obligations and responsibilities that occasionally clash with one another, it is paramount to form methods and use the resources you have available to achieve at your highest potential. 

Create a hierarchy of priorities

Reflecting back on when I was in Year 12, I found that the first step to avoid feeling overwhelmed, especially during the weeks in which most of my classes would hold assessments, was creating a hierarchy of my priorities which was a very useful tool for myself. This helped me map out what I needed to focus on first, and what tasks I could afford to allocate more time to complete or, sometimes, miss. For example, if I had an assessment that I didn’t feel one hundred per cent ready for the next day or within the next two days, I would place that at the top of the list. If I then had soccer training but had exercised already a few times that week, I placed that at the bottom of the list. Yes, at times it was hard to sacrifice missing out on the activities I loved, but sometimes during your final year of school, in order to reap the benefits at the end of the year, I needed to go forward with the decision that was going to be the most beneficial for me in the long run.

Keep your desk tidy

Another method of organisation I found beneficial during Year 12 was keeping my desk tidy. When my desk wasn’t covered in worksheets and my textbooks weren’t open and askew, I was more likely to focus and complete a task efficiently and usually, more effectively. Stacking your textbooks and novels as well as keeping worksheets either in a folder or hole punched and placed in a binder isn’t just an efficient means of organisation, but will improve your time utilisation and give you the ability to manage doing the things you like to do outside of studying. Buying sticky notes and subject dividers as well as placing your folders and textbooks in a shelf are also an effective means of keeping your desk clear and organised. 

Keep a diary

My final tip in regards to staying organised in Year 12 would be to keep a diary. Not just simply owning a diary and noting assessment dates and when projects are due, but writing in everything! For instance, noting when you were going to allocate time to study for one subject as well as when you were going to schedule time to exercise, to name a few examples. By doing this, you are much more likely to not only finish tasks, but finish tasks at a high standard. 

Organisation comprises of many different factors, including time management and utilising resources to the best of your ability. By staying organised during your final year of school, you will find that you will remain motivated and more likely to achieve at a high standard, fulfilling your potential! 

By Sarah

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