There are never gurantees though in reality. I've heard that the VCAA prompts are essentially randomly generated, but I'm not 100%, can anyone clarify?
My text has a lot of different themes which does mean I'm running quite a big risk too but I'm not sure. Perhaps it will be enough to just have enough knowledge of the whole text to write a decent response if it doesn't go my way.
VCAA prompts are not randomly generated.
There isn't some magic VCAA machine that pumps out two prompts per text every year. From my understanding, there are a bunch of people who design the prompts every year.
My two cents:
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It's Oct 26. You've been studying the theme of oranges for a text that deals with the themes apples, oranges, pears, tomatoes and zucchini for your Section A text. The main themes from this text are apples and oranges; apples was assessed last year so obv this year, it MUST be oranges. You're so ready; you're gonna write a killer text response essay on oranges because that's definitely gonna be what's on the exam. You're gonna write this hella awesome piece and then you're gonna get that 10/10 and that 50SS and become a millionaire selling oranges. You are so sorted.
Then you open the booklet.
Two prompts.
One is on zucchini, that thing you looked at once all year.
The other is on celery; how is celery in the text?!
You have two choices:
1. Write a piece on oranges when they asked for zucchini and be penalised for lack of relevance.
2. Write a piece on zucchini/celery/whatever with half-assed points and ideas because you didn't look over it and haven't written a single essay dealing with that all year.
"But I want to get my 50SS and become a millionaire selling oranges!", you say?
Well then, here's my advice:
Prepare for everything. Don't make assumptions. Focus on a particular theme if you want to take the risk but for christ's sake practice other ones. Don't assume anything. You can hope and pray for certain things but that shouldn't give you the freedom to not at least look at other things. If there's anything I learnt from failing methods and spec last year it's this: prepare for the worst case scenario while wishing for the best case scenario.
tl;dr: Oranges > Zucchini and Celery any day.