August 7, 2024 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education

Approaches to the Section B Exam Task

The following comments are prompted by reading a couple of hundred Section B semester exam responses from different schools for the BBE Marking Service. I found a good deal of what I expected in these responses, which might say more about me (and judgement-based assessment) than it tells about the students' work.

I marked the Journeys and Country Frameworks and have not marked Protest or Play responses, so this has perhaps shaped my views. Many of the Country responses could have been written for Journeys and vice versa, and how different the responses should be to different Frameworks, titles and stimuli is a significant question about this task.

Most of the students did not seem particularly concerned about linking the response to the title and the stimulus which prefigures a problem for the end of year marking?

I am not sure who wrote the tasks I marked, but the prompt sets seemed to have a big impact on what the students did. See my discussion of these prompts in my blog The Difficulty of Section B Tasks.

What did the students do?

All students felt they were up to the task and could do something. On the whole, the writing was less strained and more confident than in other sections of the exam. I have a sense that the students seem more literate in this self-directed task than in sections A and C. It would seem counter intuitive to some (although not to me) that students would write more confidently in more self-directed and personal tasks than is more simple transactional tasks. My marks were higher for Section B than for the other sections, and I found it easier than usual to give high marks in this Section. The writing seemed better than in GAT Section A (it is supposed to be a 'literacy task') which I was also marking at the same time.

Students rarely ignored but were not anxious about the constraints of the title and using a stimulus. Often the linkage to the title and the stimulus was very indirect or only implied.

There were some clear signs of different directions from teachers in the student responses. One school seemed to see fictional narrative as the standard response, and another seemed to see personal narrative as the standard response.

The most striking thing about the responses was that there was very little discussion of the Frameworks as such. Ideas in the Framework were only dealt with indirectly, and the responses were mostly examples of ideas in the Framework rather than analysis of or argument about those ideas. In that sense these responses were the opposite of a thematic task. (As I suggest in the other blog, this characteristic may be a result of the prompts set rather than the nature of the task itself.) No student referred to a mentor text, and there seemed no discernible influence of the mentor texts on what students had written.

Before going on I should mention the Eltham High School Anthology of student writing which is part of my frame of reference for some of these comments. (https://www.elthamhighanthology.com/)

We are told on the Eltham High website that this valuable anthology is 'curated' by students, and it does genuinely seem to be the case. It does feel as though the editors are teenagers and the presumed audience is teenagers. This is of course not the audience for exam responses which should be written with English teachers in mind. Some of the following comments are shaped by the differences between the pieces in the Eltham Anthology and what students offered in these exam responses. As I explained in the BBE Section B study guide, it would be good to look at and discuss pieces in the Eltham Anthology with students.

Thankfully these responses were quite unlike the dreadful and vapid generality of Section B theme responses or the comparison and contrast responses of recent exams.

There were few evidently preprepared responses, although that does not mean there will not be a problem deciding what to do with such responses at the end of the year. It seemed to me that most students were not sufficiently wary of the danger of seeming to produce a preprepared essay. They didn't feel that they had to do much to link their response to the title and a stimulus.

In my view teachers should warn students of the dangers of seeming to produce a preprepared answer, and students should expect to produce a substantially new response to a title and piece of stimulus in the exam room. It would be best until we know how things will be interpreted in the marking (if we ever get to know without being markers) to clearly link the response to a stimulus and title at the end of the year.

There was some pure fiction and a few rehashes of classic or popular stories. One student felt that Legally Blonde could do with another rendition. There was fortunately little adventure or mindless action narrative. There was some teenage angst, and, in comparison with the Eltham Anthology, there was little teenage love life. This romantic restraint was probably although not necessarily a good thing. There was a very good piece about heart break.

There was a lot of family (near and extended) which was mostly celebratory and some mournful. Family cultural backgrounds were also prominent. Adjusting to a new country was a crucial experience for some, and some of the older Australians were conscious of their own cultural background.

Not surprisingly, school life and particularly the stress of high school were prominent. Many of the students were thinking about themselves as in a period of transition and were thinking about what the near future might hold. They wrote about the end of high school and beginning of a new life. On the whole, the kinds of responses offered were about things worth writing about.

Most of the responses were about more of less personal experiences and issues. I had wondered in anticipation whether this personal element would be prominent in student responses and was heartened to see that it was. In my view the best approach to this task for most students is to ground their writing in personal experience because it is the least dangerous approach and is the one that is most likely to have impact on the reader. I am certainly interested in what they have to say about their experiences from their perspective. And I think most English teachers are.

Personal narrative is usually less likely to lead students into ideas they cannot deal with and is more likely to generate an authentic student voice. Writing grounded in personal experience is likely to produce genuine thought in areas in which students can write with authority.

There was little that was sensational or sentimental in the student responses. Florid description, particularly in the opening, seemed a quite common formula. This description often seemed inauthentically forced and overwritten. Such description is difficult to do well without seeming useless decoration.

Vividness in writing is of course a significant characteristic but it needs to seem genuinely prompted by a situation rather than being a self-conscious display. I will remember the vividness of lived experience in the account by one student of a crisis in which when being hugged by her mother she could feel her mother's heartbeat. Similarly, there was real feeling in another student's imagined image of his father, after painfully separating from the family, in a rented house, seated at a card table and eating his dinner alone. Again, this is not adjectival description, and it has the authentic vividness of lived experience. It is not descriptive writing as such. It is certainly not a matter of descriptive 'word choices'. This vividness is a circumstantial specificity of lived experience.

Some problems

The problems and challenges of the assessment were much as I had anticipated. Some students took very little notice of the title and the stimulus. Some were self-indulgent in writing something that seemed fun to them but that would be unlikely to seem much fun to an English teacher marking hundreds of scripts.

The drugged delusions of a dying addict are not something that can be readily fictionalised by most teenagers. Those who do know something of those experiences are unlikely to want to write about them in an exam. Space odysseys and cool adventures are very hard to write especially with an hour to write them in.

Some of the best responses seem very conscious of how little time and space they had. Time was not available for elaborate descriptions and stories had to be very compressed. These students didn't linger and moved very quickly from one thing to the next.

Conclusions

My enthusiasm for this new Section of the exam was reinforced by marking scripts. It was a pleasure to mark something worth writing and worth reading.

It is important innovation that students have the opportunity to write something that is personally significant for them in their VCE exams.

Congratulations to the VCAA.