To those who feel that English has no place in the top 4, I ask you to read my argument. As a maths/science student who loathed VCE English, I saw it as a chore and an encumberance during my VCE studies. I only realised the true benefits perhaps a year later.
When I was in year 12, I remember agonising greatly over English. At the start, I thought "okay, I'll get a really good tutor and it'll all work out and I won't have to do much work because it's too painful". What a spoilt brat I was.
For most of term 1, barring our oral (which I loved doing because I enjoy public speaking), I barely did a lick of work. Every week I'd go to the tutor and she'd be almost embarrassed that I was expecting her to effectively teach me English (not her job, refinement and elucidation is any tutor's job). I had read 180 (out of 300+ pages) of our first book, Lake of the Woods. I didn't do a single bit of practise writing for it outside of class (I think we had 1 or 2 in class essays? I managed to pass them, but only because I wrote what the teacher had been saying in class). The first SAC came around, and I basically got a friend to forward me the practise essays he'd done, and read them as my revision, as well as memorising a few quotes. As you might imagine, my first SAC mark came back "good". (Our marks went: Fail, Satisfactory, Good, Very Good, Excellent). It was a lovely C (according to another teacher who didn't mind depoliticising the marking scheme).
It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn't work out a way of succeeding at this subject, I was going to be severely screwed. It was an absolute pain, but the next semester, I did do 2 or 3 practise essays (and read the whole book!). I know that sounds incredibly spoiled, but it was actually a real accomplishment for me at the time to force myself to do that much work for something I hated so much.
The mark for the next book came back a much improved Very Good (a B+ by our rough standards). This gave me a confidence, and a hope, for the subject that I had never before experienced. For the creative writing SAC, I actually found a way to enjoy it. I would find a way to make my writing for it as zany and quirky as absolutely possible. I believe I authored 5 practise pieces 5-700 words long each. I almost couldn't believe it.
Roll around to studying for the exam... I hated it. I absolutely hated sitting for 3 hours writing non-stop. So I didn't. I did essays in isolation. Over 2 weeks leading up to the exam, I think I wrote 6 or 7 isolation essays in total, and did 2 past papers in timed conditions (one in our mock exams at school). If you'd have told me at the start of the year that I was going to do 15 essays (total incl. exams) for English as my revision leading up to the exam, I'd have said "over my dead body". I'm not going to lie and say that I started to enjoy it. It was a complete pain the whole way through (with perhaps the exception of creative writing), but I got on with it. My writing improved magnificently. I looked back after VCE at my writing in year 11. It was absolutely atrocious. I wrote like a child, in the most cliched, boring language you could imagine.
Through slogging away at the subject, I improved to the point where I feel I can write about whatever I want and not worry about whether or not I will convey my message effectively. Because of VCE English, I write
good well.
I am studying at university Aerospace Engineering and Science (Maths, Physics). No writing, yeah? For Engineering, I have had several long reports 15 pages in length, of which perhaps 8 pages were maths/graphs. The other 7 pages were all written. I have had perhaps 6 or 7 long reports in Physics of 1000-2000 words, each. I recently wrote a 40 page research project in Maths which was, I believe, 8000 words long.
Perhaps 1 out of every 3 times I write something for a maths/science assessment, the assessor will comment on how well it is written (the scientific content is not always fantastic, however
). I put that down solely to VCE English. I hated its guts, but boy did it teach me how to write.
There's also the fundamentally important lesson of learning "life is not fair, deal with it". I am so glad that I had an opportunity to learn it through VCE English. You think in life you will always get a garden of roses to work with? There are challenges and obstacles littered throughout your life. Overcoming these obstacles, and learning coping mechanisms for running into these obstacles and coming off a bit worse for wear is part and parcel with the goals of VCE. You are supposed to be challenged, and learn how to overcome these challenges. You're going to go complain to your course co-ordinator when there's a core unit that you loathe? And believe me, these occur in every course. You will find a unit that you hate, and you will find that it is compulsory.
English is part of your top 4 for a reason. You will use it every day for the rest of your life. If it isn't made a part of your top 4, nobody who hated the subject in their right mind would sacrifice the man hours required to get a high score would do it. They'd all aim for what they could to maximise their ENTER. I'm pretty sure VCAA doesn't want to have to explain to the government why they're turning out tens of thousands of functionally illiterate graduates.
I hated VCE English as much as you, and possibly more. But as much as it was a pain, it also gave me the gift of prose. For me, it was well worth the hardship, and the ENTER cost. I firmly believe that English should remain a compulsory subject in the top 4. It's not perfect, and I believe there can definitely be changes, but not the ones that you are proposing. Such changes would result in scores of graduates who can't read or write, an outcome too horriffic to fathom.
Edit: The wordcount of this post is 1100 words and took me roughly half an hour to write. At the start of VCE English, I struggled to write 500 words in 1 hour, on any topic. Worth it? Definitely.
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