Paper 2 Discussion (Advanced)

[jasminesadiqi]

guys!!! so they obviously chose the poem for us... but the thing is I didn't study much for the chosen poem! 'journey of the magi.' anyway, do you know how it said 'at least one other poem' i did two more, because i didnt know much about the chosen poem. will i lose marks? but i wrote about them all in an equal level!

[daenyy]

anyone else not finish lol?

[Ellen310]

Paper 2 was alright but definitely felt more confident about Paper 1.
Mod A = I do Letters to Alice/Pride and Prejudice and whilst the question itself was easy to understand it was strangely specific when it asked about social class because Letters to Alice doesn't cover that much (plus...I hadn't really revised on my quotes and examples on social class for both texts because I primarily focused on marriage and the role of the women whoopsies). Tried to adapt it as much as possible but I know the second half of my essay is definitely pretty weak

Mod B = The Hamlet question wasn't too bad, although there were a lot of elements to it and it was worded a little strangely when it said "That is its strength. That is its weakness." so took a little time to wrap my head around how I could answer that. Also it was the first question I did so I know my writing was a bit frazzled, but I think I argued that its strength lay in how it offers audiences a dissenting/new view on revenge tragedy form through its lack of conventional heroes, yet its weakness is it does not offer audiences a complete resolution (then discussed about Hamlet and how he does not experience a true moment of catharsis at the end of the play in comparison to other revenge tragedy heroes or characters in play itself, such as Laertes + his questioning/contemplative nature that leads lack of resolution). This question was good though in the sense you could talk a lot about Hamlet's humanist, existential nature and how this made him an 'unconventional hero'. Also tied in Claudius and linked the first part of the question to the revenge tragedy form etc

Mod C = Lol thought the people and politics question was so dramatic and, like with a lot of the questions, was worded quite strangely and there were a lot of elements you had to address. Also it was hard because it didn't really relate to my prescribed/related text because another perspective isn't really shown, but my thesis was just that there is a contest of perspectives yet it is ultimately won by political figures and they 'block' their opposing perspective etc etc.

Overall exam was OK but not feeling super confident about it, at least advanced is DONE and we never have to stress about writing 3 essays in 2 hours ever again !!! )))

[Em444]

Mod A- Julius Caesar and The Prince we had to talk about manipulation so I talked in one paragraph about how rulers can manipulate their appearance and then did a second paragraph about morality and did a kinda weak link to the question by saying that manipulation is immoral oops
Mod B- Citizen Kane a weird question but not as specific as I feared. I talked about how Kane valued personal control and wealth over emotion and how his downfall refutes the American Dream and continues to be relevant to society. I said that the weakness was a lack of emotional engagement in the audience but this was also its strength because its a reflection of how pursuing power and wealth leads to a lack of fulfillment but I don't know if I got this across very clearly
Mod C- I really liked, didn't write as much as I hoped though. I said that Brave New World and my ORT use textual forms and features as the means available to them to argue for freedom in preference to totalitarianism and individuality in preference to stability.

I feel so much better now that English is done!! I don't have another exam until Monday!

[inescelic]

I seriously can not stop overthinking about this exam. . .
Mod B- Whoever else did ts eliot, how did you approach the strength/ weakness? I discussed how the STRENGTH of his poetry lies in his ability to use the voice to reflect the Modernist individual's distressed psyche, and ultimately the WEAKNESS of the individual in the Modernist world (i.e. isolation and loss of identity). What do you think?

[TheFreeMarketeer]

I did not even address strength or weakness, mainly because I went against the question claiming that the personal reflection doubled as a social commentary, through a provision of insight.

I don't know though.

[jamonwindeyer]

Overall gys i just wanted to say a huge , huge ,huge thankyou to you guys honestly your efforts are much appreciated  I hope that i too soon can start helping aha probs in the more mathy sciency sort of areas .
But honestly thanks heaps 

So happy to have been helpful! We'd love for you to stick around through the exam period and beyond to help others out

I don't know if I answered the mod B question properly (Cloudstreet). My whole argument was that ordinary people have the power to change their weaknesses to strengths. let me know what you guys think ?

Did anyone do Wit and Donne for Mod A? How valid is arguing that love is portrayed through ones love for life in one of the paragraphs haha? I did love in relationships for the other 2 paras.

Anyone spare any comments on my approaches? Thoughts? Words of wisdom? Glad it's over but sort of ambivalent as to how I responded.

All sound good to me guys! Don't worry about it, exam is done now!!

guys!!! so they obviously chose the poem for us... but the thing is I didn't study much for the chosen poem! 'journey of the magi.' anyway, do you know how it said 'at least one other poem' i did two more, because i didnt know much about the chosen poem. will i lose marks? but i wrote about them all in an equal level!

That is definitely okay! I did the same when they specified in my year and went fine!

I seriously can not stop overthinking about this exam. . .
Mod B- Whoever else did ts eliot, how did you approach the strength/ weakness? I discussed how the STRENGTH of his poetry lies in his ability to use the voice to reflect the Modernist individual's distressed psyche, and ultimately the WEAKNESS of the individual in the Modernist world (i.e. isolation and loss of identity). What do you think?

This sounds like a good approach to me!

[jasnkapadia]

So definitely a very weird, but very interesting exam. Thanks for accommodating this rant, just getting started here but happy to share my thoughts

I agree with @soy5, I definitely needed that five minutes reading time to think through how to approach each of the questions, they were worded horrendously but could be understood if you broke them down enough. Eventually I wrote in the order C, A, B simply because I was most to least prepared like that.

My responding to the questions wasn't actually too bad. But I feel like what will screw me over is that I was writing slow > running out of time > which resulted in writing not so much (my responses were between 4-6 pages).

Module A - Metropolis and 1984 - this was a good question for me, basically the focus of my practised essay was on leaders of totalitarian societies abusing their power to oppress and control, and the importance of human relationships in sustaining human existence. I compared the use of physical oppression in Metropolis with use of psychological oppression in 1984.

Module B - T.S. Eliot - OMG JOURNEY OF THE MAGI...so this was the one poem that, for some reason, I hadn't prepared very well for. Did some extremely light revision and readover of the poem in the morning and somehow managed to scrape through with a good argument about Eliot's personal reflection of religion. I compared this with Prufrock and his wider social commentary about ambiguity around relationships and identity. Obviously I linked the "personal voices" to his use of Prufrock and the Magi to speak and connect with his audience in a relatable way. And then I said that both aspects (personal reflection and wider social commentary) are what makes T.S. Eliot's poetry everlasting, so the fact that he privileges personal reflection is both a STRENGTH and a WEAKNESS. What a HELL of a question.

Module C - The Art of Travel - this question was actually pretty good. Our school's trial question was eerily similar, talking about "positive and negative" aspects of the relationship between people and landscapes, and this one was talking about "enriching and uneasy" aspects. So my prepared essay fit almost perfectly. I talked about how some aspects of travelling individuals' experiences of landscapes can be enriching to their understandings, whereas others can be "uneasy" because they are limited by the personal traits they bring with them. Only upsetting part is that I took a bit too long on this response because I forgot a few of de Botton's quotes! xD

Overall, I think this was definitely harder than Paper 1 in terms of depth and complexity (and obviously the need to write three essays in two hours). But I am expecting to get about the same in both, so let's just wait and see

Hope everyone else went well - and for those who didn't, keep your hopes up, remember 2 units of English only make up 20% of your aggregate
Excited to get onto all of my other subjects!!

[mjorfian]

Mod A- Julius Caesar and The Prince we had to talk about manipulation so I talked in one paragraph about how rulers can manipulate their appearance and then did a second paragraph about morality and did a kinda weak link to the question by saying that manipulation is immoral oops
Mod B- Citizen Kane a weird question but not as specific as I feared. I talked about how Kane valued personal control and wealth over emotion and how his downfall refutes the American Dream and continues to be relevant to society. I said that the weakness was a lack of emotional engagement in the audience but this was also its strength because its a reflection of how pursuing power and wealth leads to a lack of fulfillment but I don't know if I got this across very clearly
Mod C- I really liked, didn't write as much as I hoped though. I said that Brave New World and my ORT use textual forms and features as the means available to them to argue for freedom in preference to totalitarianism and individuality in preference to stability.

I feel so much better now that English is done!! I don't have another exam until Monday!

I took that same exact approach for module A lolz I think we're okay

[sudodds]

guys!!! so they obviously chose the poem for us... but the thing is I didn't study much for the chosen poem! 'journey of the magi.' anyway, do you know how it said 'at least one other poem' i did two more, because i didnt know much about the chosen poem. will i lose marks? but i wrote about them all in an equal level!

Hey! To you, and anyone else freaking out about not including the prescribed poem enough within their exam, little anecdote that will hopefully calm you're nerves aha.

I did TS Eliot last year, and the only poem I didn't study was Hollow Men.

Guess what the prescribed poem was.

Hollow Men.

I knew only one quote from the entire thing, and that quote was: "prickly pear". That was it. Couldn't remember anything else. So I analysed the shit out of that one quote in one of my paragraphs, analysed the title in another, and then just focused on my other poems for the rest of the essay (Prufrock and Magi I believe! But it may have been Rhapsody... can't 100% remember).

And I still ended up getting a band 6 So don't worry yourselves too much - if I could literally go into the exam and just write a full essay on spiky pears and still come out with an overall good mark, I'm sure that all of you are absolutely fine Remember that it wasn't just a hard question for you, it was a hard question for everyone, so scaling and moderation will fix it all up if something did go a bit wrong!

[kaya-sandwich]

I've got very mixed feelings about this paper. The Mod C People and Landscapes question was beautiful and really easy to manipulate. So was the Mod A Metropolis/1984 question but I had a little freak out on the leadership bit so I just talked about leadership through oppression and how German audiences desired strong and stable leaders unlike the leaders that they had during the Weimar epoch. Essentially I talked about Maria as a leader and juxtaposed this to RoboMaria, Big Brother as a leader with allusions to Stalin, and Fredersen as an oppressive dictator who redeems himself over the course of the film to become a more understanding leader. The Hamlet question was the worst. I barely talked about dramatic form other than soliloquies but I was able to quote 3 critics word for word. I'm not sure how helpful that'll be for marks but oh well. I'll (hopefully) never have to write another Discovery essay/creative or a Shakespeare essay ever again. But hey you guys, WE DID IT!!! WE FINISHED ENGLISH!!! (except for you extension people, my condolences)

[PARLIAMO]

Mod A - 1984 and Metropolis - good
Mod B - WB Yeats - even better
Mod C - Art of Travel - scintillating form

[rodero]

Mod A - 1984 and Metro was a straightforward question once you got your head around leadership and what it entails
Mod B - Not too bad honestly, I mainly linked the strengths of Hamlet to it's enduring value and how his introspection allows his dilemma to resonate with a contemporary audience
Mod C - People and Politics was taken straight from the rubric - competing perspectives. Would've been nice to have some more direct quotes, but I'd say I went decent overall

[pikachu975]

Mod A - inferiority was okay hopefully my essay was good
Mod B - so many parts of the question I hope I addressed them all. Some analysis may seem very bsed because it was, and lots of people didn't prepare for among school children, I didn't see how it fit in the question but hopefully I bsed it well.
Mod C - dodgy words like contest and battle which I tried to include in my essay without being colloquial so hopefully it worked.

[justwannawish]

Tbh, I'm disappointed about the exam. I went in feeling confident and walked out feeling unsure and uncertain (discoveries can be confronting and provocative amrite ). Seeing as English is my best subject, I expected better and I achieved nowhere near what I aimed for.