I'm curious, if you were to design your own VCE course structure, what would you put into it?
More Physics for sure.
Seriously though, I should've perhaps been a bit more precise in what I meant by 'a very defined and narrow set of skills'. What I meant was, students will adapt their responses to questions to fulfill an examiner's marking scheme. They're not studying the content as much as they are studying how to answer a question so as to appease an examiner. Often you'll find in the classroom, innovation in problem solving is discouraged, and alternative ways of looking at things frowned upon. On an anecdotal level, my Spec teacher deducted a mark from an internal assessment because I wrote -i -3 instead of -3 - i, and the question said state your answer in the form a +ib. Not that that means that the VCE system is flawed, but it does reinforce the idea that you're learning how to answer questions more than you are learning principles and then using your own intuition to answer questions. I don't think I'll be the first on this forum to have voiced the opinion that I go to school to learn, not to learn how to do well on exams.
As for re-structuring, I think the entire curriculum should be accelerated and deepened to match international standards. When I was living in Japan for a month on my school trip, students in Year 9 were learning the Cosine rule and Sine rule in class, and a strict appreciation of mathematical proof was demonstrated by the teacher.
They also didn't rush through their mathematics, like the VCE does. The depth of what Japanese students knew about maths was clear when we were asked to prove why the internal angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. To put it lightly, it was not a good day for Team Australia.
Also, I managed to acquire two of their Year 12 mathematics textbooks, and there was no Calculus to be seen, instead, there was a wicked amount of Geometry, especially in circles. This gave me the impression that they take more time in learning things properly, rather than skipping straight to Calculus like the VCE does, which really is quite a complex idea for a bunch of adolescents.
And this is probably a bit extreme, but I think we can all agree that there are a few studies in the VCE that are really hard to count as proper subjects. Sociology for example is a bit a joke, and any well-read English student could make most of it up. Further mathematics kind of has its place, but I think we'll all agree that the students that course is targeted for cannot do well in it. The same goes for a few other subjects that aren't really specific disciplines but have been put into the VCE to give it a bit of 'breadth': Health and Human Development, Business Management et cetera.
In short, the VCE has to cater for a lot of people and I'm not saying it does a particularly bad job, but there's always room for improvement.
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