Friday, September 24, 2004

VCE by numbers 

Chris and I were grousing today about how VCE left us totally unprepared for university. We concluded that VCE is better for getting into hard courses, but IB actually teaches you how to PASS them. It's far easier to get fantabulous marks in VCE. Even charlatans like moi can convince the VCAA that they're bright young things.

With that in mind, I bring you: IDIOTS' GUIDE TO VCE or HOW TO GET AN 99.85 ENTER EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE AS THICK AS A BRICK

General tricks:
-VCE is about impressing the examiners and your teachers. Thus, read your subject outlines and suck up to your teachers, who will be marking up to half of your assessment. Figure out what they like. If you can, switch to an "easy" teacher because even though there is cross-marking, the crossmarker is probably not that willing to challenge her colleague.
-VCE is about cramming. How else are you going to keep up with all those SACs? Sleep is for the weak.
-Cheat sheets are your friends. Actually spend time on them.
-Scaling is your friend. If you have any talent for languages at all, do French/Latin/Hebrew/Chinese. I recommend the former two because they're similar to English and you can guess all the cognates. If you're a mathsy person, do Spesh but one warning: it's actually hard. Sciences don't have a great marks-to-effort ratio.
-Exams are all about practice. Get your hands on as many old papers as possible.
-Every subject has a "trick". These will be explained below.
-In any essay type subjects, an important component is STRUCTURE. Easy marks.

-English: for the text component, you'll need to cram quotes, to the point where you're dreaming in Shakespearian. Keep to shortish quotes. Watch the movie of the book if possible, so you can remember the story better. Keep a running commentary in class, then organise your notes under the headings of character/themes/relationships. Read crib notes and steal ideas from them. When writing essays, use big words (correctly! eg. for Iago: Machiavellian, misogynistic, expediency), never take an extreme position: always have a nuanced view (eg. tragic events in Othello is not just b/c Iago is pure evil but b/c he plays on O's weaknesses). For the media analysis component, learn those lists of analysis vocab (eg. appeals to patriotism/xenophobia/family values, all the diff ways to say "X says", sophisticated adjectives). For your argumentative, the key thing is structure. It's easier if you dream up a convincing persona. Choose more open forms such as a speech so you can use more rhetoric.

-French: for the written components, cram vocab. Know impressive grammar (subjunctive, participles, dont, y, en, past conditional, plus-que-parfait, etc). Have some subjunctive leaders that you can always throw in (pour que, c'est important que, bien que). Vary your structures, don't just use "il y a" and "je pense que...". Learn logical connectors, expressions of cause/consequence, vocab to express your opinion. Know your text types ("veuillez bien accepter mes sentiments distingués..."). Keep to the frigging word limit (sigh). Choose a convincing "voice" for the main written part of the exam. For the oral, script your responses to expected questions WORD FOR WORD. Learn them so that you're dreaming in French. Then talk to yourself, pretend you're the examiner and try to answer while sounding natural. Learn French fillers. Keep to the right register. For the listening, practice with internet radio (Europe1.fr). During the actual thing, take short notes and underline questions that you haven't answered yet so you remember to focus on them for the next round.

-Maths (methods): do your set work. Do topic summaries after you finish the topic. Create kickass cheat sheets. Learn by heart the trig relations, look to your cheat sheet for longer formulae. Do a SHITLOAD of papers. Get decent programs on your graphic calculator.

-Chem: like maths. Prac SACs are easy marks, so prepare well for them beforehand.

-Latin: for the unseen, get the Cambridge grammar book and learn all your conjugations and declensions by heart. It's a bitch, but it makes translation 10x easier. Learn the meanings of ablative absolutes, they're hairy. Actually...just learn everything in the book, with an eye to the fact that your purpose is to understand and translate Lat->Eng. Use your common sense. Practice a lot. Know some military vocab cos apparently that's common. For the seen text part, check the vocab before you translate in class, check your translation against your friends' and official ones to weed out any really obvious errors- but keep your own tone. Keep notes on style/themes/characters. Learn your style vocab (metonymy, zeugma, etc). Learn to scan and note any oddities. Use academic texts to figure out the style motifs. Stick to your text and don't try to be too smartarsed. Go to the Latin schools night at Melb Uni: very useful and come on, free pizza! Learn words that come up again and again, but otherwise, your dictionary is your friend.

There ya go. >99 marks if you can pull it off. No guarantee that you'll actually learn anything; in fact, you'll probably kill your curiosity and appetite for learning forever. But at least you'll be in a prestigious course.

# posted at 1:22 am

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