Amid a cacophony of nervous laughter and cramping hands, the youngest student to do the marathon year 12 VCE English exam was calm and collected.
Nadia Marikar, a 15-year-old from Balwyn High School, was one of 43,373 students to sit the three-hour exam on Tuesday.
Nadia Marikar is part of an accelerated program at Balwyn High School. Credit: Joe Armao
Last year, at 14, Nadia did her first year 12 VCE exam in further maths. But knowing she was the youngest in the state sitting for the English exam wasn’t too daunting.
“It’s never really impacted how I feel, I’ve always been with peers who are older than me,” she said. “They don’t treat me like I’m younger.”
Students must write three essays based on texts or films they’ve studied, including analysis of an article provided, which this year was about a regional community where a young group of musicians wanted to put on a garden festival.
“I’m happy to have it over and done with, but I’m happy with how it went,” Nadia said.
“I was oddly calm this morning, feeling pretty relaxed which was good and then got into the zone. I only really started freaking out on the way here … It was a pretty hectic morning but overall pretty good.”
Jacob Gasparini is the head of English at Loyola College, a regional Catholic high school in Watsonia. Gasparini said “it was a really good, accessible and fair exam, nothing surprising at all,” noting that his students felt confident and were almost buoyant after the exam.
“Students said it was a little on the longer side to what they had been used to previously, but they found it relatively easy to understand and break down.”
Loyola student Wesley Mills, 19, said the time flew by for him, and he hadn’t found it too hard.
The article was a bit long, Wesley thought, but nevertheless the test was “pretty stock standard” in relation to the practice exams he’d done. “I feel relieved but want to get my other exams finished now,” he said.
The exams have fallen during a tumultuous period for some students, who experienced earlier disruptions to their schooling due to the pandemic, and have been impacted by the Voice to parliament referendum or the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Balwyn High School’s director of English, Amy Wood, said the impacts of COVID for this year’s cohort had still been a challenge. “These students had a fairly disrupted year 9 and 10, which has impact beyond those years,” she said.
Wood said her students were happy with the exam topics that relating to the texts they studied – Photograph 51 by Anne Ziegler, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and the film High Ground directed by Stephen John – which she said offered enough challenge and complexity, but were also accessible.
VCE year 12 English texts
All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
Bad Dreams and Other Stories - Tess Hadley
Born a Crime - Trevor Noah
False Claims of Colonial Thieves - Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella
Flames - Robbie Arnott
Go, Went, Gone - Jenny Erpenbeck
High Ground - directed by Stephen Johnson
Much Ado About Nothing - William Shakespeare
Nine Days - Toni Jordan
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Rainbow’s End - Jane Harrison
Requiem for a Beast - Matt Ottley
Runaway - Alice Munro
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Sunset Boulevard - directed by Billy Wilder
The Erratics: A Memoir - Vicki Laveau-Harvie
The Women of Troy - Euripides
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney - William Wordsworth
“I have seen a lot of smiles, a lot of happy faces, even students who were incredibly stressed before the exam have come out with a smile on their face, so I think they are feeling pretty positive as well,” Wood said.
The VCE exam period kicked off on October 2 with performance exams, including music, dance and oral language. Tuesday marks the beginning of the written exam period, with the last exams scheduled for November 15. Students will receive results on December 11.
Bendigo Senior Secondary College had the largest number of students taking the English exam, with 853 students, while Manangatang P-12 College, River Nile School, and Lavers Hill K-12 College were the smallest, each with only four students.
While Nadia is the youngest to sit exams this year, there are also 215 mature-age students. She is one of 25 students in Balwyn High School’s SEAL program – an accelerated program for gifted students.
This year she is doing three VCE subjects, English, biology and maths methods, and will do another four next year, bringing her total year 12 subjects to eight. SEAL students can do up to nine subjects, while most VCE students do six.
Last year, at 14, Nadia did her first year 12 VCE exam in further maths.Credit: Joe Armao
Head of the school’s SEAL program, Jen Jones, said there were about 70 students doing year 12 subjects this year. Doing extra subjects gave students the chance to change their mind about their career pathways.
“If Nadia doesn’t get the English score she wants, she could do another English subject next year and maximise her results,” she said. “We have this program because students are able to do subjects at a younger age and be really successful. That’s why we have it.”
Nadia hopes to go to university straight after school, but because of her young age may need special permission from the dean, depending on the university.
Education Minister Ben Carroll congratulated students and thanked families, carers and teachers for their support, reminding students that “exam results do not define you and education continues beyond school”.
Students can receive their 2023 results via email by registering at resultsandatar.vic.edu.au and the VCE Results and ATAR app from 7am on December 11.
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