November 28, 2025 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education

What is the status of the set task in the VCE English Exam?

The nature of the set tasks and the expectations of the markers are crucial in VCE English, as in most exams. The tasks and the expectations of the markers control the way and the extent to which students (and teachers) can prepare for the exam.

In Section A students must deal with the question and nothing but the question. The extent to which the response directly addresses the question is a crucial issue in grading. Relevance to the question is the way markers distinguish between the substantial, worthy responses and preprepared, learned or plagiarised responses.

Section C is a formula task so there is no question as such. As a result there is no difficulty about the status of the question because in this section the topic and the text to be analysed are unseen. Students can prepare formula comments for the formula task, but the exam reports consistently comment on the weakness of formula comments applied with little appropriateness to the set text. Students need to deal directly with the set text rather than replaying rehearsed comments to score well.

The new Section B is an unfamiliar and uncertain challenge for teachers and students. Because the Framework is known and prepared for, the set task is designed with the constraints of a set title and stimulus as protection against preprepared or plagiarised responses.

There are a real problems with Section B because there have been no directions (or even any hints) given by the VCAA (or their representatives) about the way and the degree to which the constraints are to be dealt with by students.

There was practically no discussion of the nature of the Section B task in the exam report of 2024. Stellar example responses were given as an exam report, but these examples were of very limited usefulness because they were exemplary in all respects to an outstanding degree.

It might be claimed that the expectations of the exam marking are made explicit through the criteria for assessment stated on the paper and in the published Expect Qualities of responses at different levels. But the criteria and the EQs carry very little information, and they offer no meaningful direction about the actual expectations of the marking.

The first criteria about the content of a response is ‘relevant ideas’. As this is the case it is only reasonable to infer that the relevance to the set stimulus and the title is a central issue in the assessment. Curiously the issue of relevance to the Framework is the only issue dealt with in the exam report of 2024 where it is stated that students may not use the title and stimulus set for one Framework to discuss another Framework.

The EQs for scores of 8 to 10 do not give us any indication of the relative importance of different characteristics.

The first dot point in the high level EQs describe ‘insightful’ and ‘astute’ handling of the ideas in the stimulus. This might be taken as clear direction except that, in practice, it is not clear what ‘ideas’ are presented in the title and the stimulus that have been set. And if it is not clear what ideas are presented in a title and a stimulus (not to mention the relationship between the two) then it is not clear what it means to be relevant or irrelevant.

The tasks of 2025 are much the same as those of 2024. The titles can be one word, are usually two of three words and can be a three or four word sentence. It should be noted that only one of these titles is a sentence and hence only one of them is a proposition. What could be less specific than a single words like Connections or Origins? The titles are very general and they offer very little constraint in terms of making a relevant response.

The stimulus in 2025 is the same as in 2024, and they are as vague and general as the titles.

Stimulus 1 is a statement.

Stimulus 2 is an image.

Stimulus 3 is a poetic expression.

The tasks of 2025 are still very open, and the challenging uncertainties of the task are the same as they were in 2024. They prompt following questions.

• To what extent are the title, and the stimulus to be a constraint?
• How substantial and direct does the response have to be to the Framework, the title and stimulus?
• Is a strong link better that an indirect or weak link?

• What are the chances of being able to repeat a previous piece of writing in response to the exam task?

• Should students prepare responses to the Framework that they expect to use for any title or stimulus?
• In judging the quality of responses, how much of an issue is the directness of the link of a response to the title and stimulus?

These questions show the fundamental uncertainties about the preparing, teaching and examining of this exam task that should be clarified.

The second criterion on the exam paper mentions the incorporation of ‘an appropriate voice’, but this need not mean, one hopes, that generating a distinctive ‘voice’ is the purpose for the writing and a key characteristic of superior performance.

The duplication or mimicking of speech or particular language features in the exam (and this in summary is what is meant by the term ‘voice’) is less likely to encourage or allow a clear focus on the title, stimulus and Framework than a conventional essay form written for the usual purposes.

It might seem that the third criterion about text structures and language (this criterion does not appear in the other sections) would also seem to suggest a premium on mimicking language forms in an exam response. Like the issue of ‘relevance’, the uncertainties about the criterion of the ‘use of suitable text structures and language features to create a text’ are not discussed in the Examiners’ Report of 2024. The examples of outstanding work in the report are not annotated in terms of text structure and language features, and there is nothing particular or special about these features of the outstanding examples.

In so far as there is a potential tension between the first three exam criteria, it seems to me that primacy should be given to the first of ‘relevant ideas’. And such primacy should, among other things, be declared in an exam report. But it is hard to see what relevance means with such vague topics and stimulus.

The lack of information about the expectations and the marking of the new Section B is most unsatisfactory, and it is to be hoped that there is some real analyse of the task and the explanation of the marking in the exam report of 2025.