VCE English Exam: How it Works

There are three parts to the VCE English exam: Section A, Text Response; Section B, Crafting Texts; and Section C, Argument Analysis. Each section has its own challenges, but each can also be conquered with different tips and tricks.

Let’s see how it works.

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How does the VCE English exam work?

The VCE English exam has two parts: reading time and writing time. You have 15 minutes reading time and three hours writing time. Usually, the exam begins at 9:00 AM, and ends at 12:15 PM, and is the first exam in the major exam block.

You are usually allowed to bring in pens to complete the exam, and a dictionary so you can look up words if necessary.

When the exam starts, you get 15 minutes to read through the VCE English exam paper from beginning to end. This time helps you to understand the exam, what questions you are being asked, and gives you some time to start planning your responses. You are not allowed to touch pens, pencils, or any stationery during this time, though you can look through your dictionary if you need.

Once reading time ends at 9:15, the examiner will prompt you to start writing. You can then pick up a pen and begin your responses. You have three hours to complete the VCE English exam, ending at 12:15 PM.

During these three hours, you must write three essays, one for each section of the exam. Let’s see what these involve.

Section A: Tips for VCE English Text Response

In this first part of the VCE English exam, you have to write an essay based on a book, movie, play, or collection of poetry or short stories. VCAA has a published list of 20 texts which will be on the exam. Every year, approximately 20 percent of the books on the list change (i.e., 5 books get taken off and 5 new ones get added). Each book stays for four years.

You can find the list for each year on the VCAA website.

In 2025, the books studied are:

• Flames – Robbie Arnott
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• Go, Went, Gone – Jenny Erpenbeck
• My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel García Márquez
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
  • Find quotes for isolation and persecution here!
• Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss
• The Memory Police – Yōko Ogawa
• Bad Dreams and Other Stories – Tessa Hadley
• The Complete Stories – David Malouf
• Rainbow’s End – Jane Harrison
• Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare
• Oedipus the King – Sophocles
• New and Selected Poems – Mary Oliver
• False Claims of Colonial Thieves – Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella
• High Ground (2020) – Stephen Johnson
• Sunset Boulevard (1950) – Billy Wilder
  • See a sample essay response!
• Requiem for a Beast – Matt Ottley
• The Erratics – Vicki Laveau-Harvie
• Born a Crime – Trevor Noah

Your school will pick two of these 20 texts. You will study both throughout the year; however, you only need to pick one to write about in the final VCE English exam. Since you only need to do one text response on one text, you should pick the one you like better. Don’t worry about learning both for the exam.

Because this part of the course has been around for many years, lots of students are quite proficient in text response essays. Many schools are also very good at teaching it. This means that this part of the exam is quite competitive, and you do have to know a lot about your book and be quite a good writer to do well.

To make sure that you have a good chance at doing well in text response, you should:

1. Read the book and make sure you understand the plot, characters, and themes very well.
   1. Here's a framework for organising your notes best!
2. Practise planning at least 20 essay topics. This will give you practice in coming up with ideas to write about under time pressure.
3. Practise making your writing as clear and simple as possible. Many students struggle with expression because even though their ideas are good, they are not expressed clearly. VCAA markers want something that’s easy to read and straightforward. Don’t worry about fancy vocab. Make clarity your first priority.

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Section B: Tips for VCE English Crafting Texts

2024 was the first year of the new curriculum with the Crafting Texts component replacing the comparative. In 2024, many students found preparation for this area of the VCE English exam easy; however, few people did very well.

The point of Crafting Texts in VCE English is to write a piece which explores ideas about one of four themes. In 2024 and 2025, the themes are: protest, personal journey, play, and country. Your piece must have a clear message, be well written, and be tied to the title.

Last year, many students struggled with adapting their pieces to the title, even though most students had memorised a good piece which scored well in the SAC. The VCAA assessors in the exam report noticed this and said that students have to pay attention to the framework of ideas, or theme, that they are writing about. Don't mix two themes together! Students must also pay attention to the title. If your piece is not on topic, it won’t do well.

Fortunately, because many students already memorise a piece for Crafting Texts before they get into the exam, it does mean that Section B can sometimes be completed a little bit quicker than the other sections. In previous years, students were advised to spend exactly one hour per section of the VCE English exam. However, if you’re very confident with Crafting Texts, you might only need to spend 40 or 45 minutes writing your piece. This could give you some much-needed additional time to make your Sections A and C strong. That said, don’t use the shorter time to skimp on quality.

There are three things to keep in mind to help you write a top-tier Crafting Texts response:

1. Good writing. First and foremost, you must have good prose and expression. Your piece should be clear to read, interesting, and not use any cliché expressions or sound like it was written by AI.
2. Clear message. The best pieces are super clear about what the message and intention of the piece is and often sum it up near the conclusion. Making your message explicit by directly stating it for your examiner is a good way to stand out and show that you understand the task requirements.
3. Link to title. Many students forget that the title is really the prompt of the VCE English exam task. As good as your piece is, and as well as it did in the SAC, it will not do well in the VCE English exam unless it connects directly to the title provided. Lots of students missed this in the first year of the course, and it cost them higher grades that they would have otherwise received.

See a sample top scoring response here!

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Section C: Tips for the VCE English Argument Analysis Section

Although attaining a basic competency in argument analysis is not too tricky, Section C is arguably the most difficult part of the VCE English exam to score very highly on. If you need a score of 10 out of 10 in a VCE English argument analysis essay, you will be working quite hard to stand out against other students. With argument analysis in VCE English, it’s very important to focus on one main thing: you have to very incisively describe exactly what the author is trying to do and explain why.

This section of the VCE English exam often leads people to spend slightly too long writing, because they see so many things in the article and want to talk about all of them. However, you mustn’t fall into the trap of going over time. If you do, you’ll run out of the precious time you need to write a full text response and might even struggle to finish your Crafting Texts piece.

One key tip: it’s good to do the argument analysis section first while everything you just read in reading time is fresh in your mind. This saves time in the VCE English exam and means you don’t have to go back and read the piece twice. However, be careful to adhere to timing restrictions, and don’t get lulled into a false sense of security by doing this section first.

Here are three tips for making your argument analysis essay stand out:

1. When doing your analysis, be very specific about the different types of people in the audience who would be affected. Try to talk about how some language will appeal more to older people, while other language will appeal more to younger audiences. For every different demographic, try to explain how a different part of the article would affect them. This is a really good way of showing specificity and nuance in your analysis.
   1. Here are some sample sentence starters you can use for your analysis to make it flow smoothly.
2. Try to focus more on emotive techniques than on basic persuasive techniques like rhetorical questions, statistics, or expert opinion. Firstly, in the final VCE English exam, the pieces are often much more emotional than logical, so you need to focus on addressing that part of the task. But secondly, analysis of things like statistics and rhetorical questions is often quite basic and not particularly interesting. You probably know yourself when you write it that it's quite boring and repetitive! On the other hand, it takes a lot of skill to be able to see emotional appeals in an article, so if you can try to identify and talk about two in each of your bodyparagraphs, that’ll go a long way to setting you apart from other students.
3. Try to talk about how techniques build on each other. Rather than analysing each technique in isolation, try to talk about how each one either adds to or differs from the previous technique. Not only does this make your paragraphs flow very smoothly, but it also conveys to the assessor that you understand why the argument was ordered the way it was - something a lot of students miss. This will really help you stand out both for writing quality and for ideas.

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