The biggest shock of my life :(

[Christiano]

What is FLAPC

It's a convention used when writing a written explanation or 'explanation of decisions': Form, Language, Audience, Purpose and Context.

[mystikal]

dw about it too much, happened to me as well but my skool was fairly good overall.. and the students werent half bad either... i was scoring B's average for my SAC's and after the exam i got an A on for my other 2 parts i got A's(from B to A) on for some reason. What im trying to say is.... just ask your teacher... how can you improve on your next essay and redo your SAC one and get it recorrected by them to see what they think again. If you want to get good SAC scores... you have to play it by the teachers books unfortunately so do whatever it takes to please them... HOWEVER once exam time comes... you can choose to write what you believe is right and not according to your teachers conditions. If the examiner sees that ur exam quality is extremely good, your sac marks will get relooked again plus the GAT as well so it might adjust ur SAC marks. Dont get discouraged by this, learn from it and move on.

[werdna]

You should be able to get your paper re-marked, check with your teacher. At my school, SACs are marked by my teacher, then cross-marked by another teacher. If students feel that they've received an unfair score, they can get the paper marked again by another teacher, and I think if they take the score in between. If you still feel that the mark you've received is unfair after this, you can get it marked by the English Domain Leader who will give the final mark, no ifs, no buts.. obviously this won't be the process in all schools, so check with your teacher!

[flash36]

I agree with what's been said previously in this thread; ultimately you need to please your English teacher to do well on SACs, and once you're writing the exam, you have to please the examiners. What is irritating about this is that your teacher may not correct your work in correspondence with what a VCAA examiner would. So you just have to be flexible, and possibly put up with a few slightly lower SAC marks than you expect whilst being confident that your style will serve you well on the exam.

Having said that, having skim-read your piece, it appears to be overly verbose and convoluted; you seem to be using 'big words' just for the sake of it - some teachers don't like this. Whilst sophisticated language is necessary, sometimes points need to be expressed simply and explicitly to gain the desired effect.

[Slumdawg]

The best piece of advice I could give you is to stop trying to make your vocab extremely sophisticated. In VCE english, being overly verbose is highly frowned upon and will lose you more marks than using language which is too simple. It's definitely safer to use simple language than it is to use difficult vocab! I personally was exactly like you at the start of the year, second guessing my vocab and constantly trying to find new words to cram into my essays when 90% of the time they didn't even fit appropriately. Learn your lesson quickly, it's very important.

Stop focusing on vocab and turn your attention to learning how to answer the prompt as precisely as possible and having a detailed knowledge of all aspects of your books which will enable you to create better ideas.. This should be your focus, NOT vocab. Trust me on this! By the end of last year I realised that I do have a good enough vocab and I just stuck with words that I knew and had heard before. In the end although my text response piece had barely any complex vocab I still pulled a 9.5/10 in the exam for it, this really does prove vocab isn't everything.

I'd say the only time you should focus on vocab is to compile a list of words that are specific to your texts or context. This is important, e.g. my text for section A was a mountaineering book so I took a decent amount of time to become familiar with mountaineering terminology, this didn't mean I was looking for complex words but rather I was looking for words which fit the text I was writing about. And similarly for your context (I'm guessing it's identity and belonging) spend time going through words which could be used that fit specifically to your context. Just for the record, I always scored higher on an essay when I wasn't forcing myself to put impressive vocab in.

[Christiano]

Thanks for the advice peeps, its really helped me as well as others. This thread has really lifted my head up again and re-motivated me to do better!