Writing Band Six Essays-DO NOT PREPARE AND LEARN ONE ANSWER
In case the capital letters didn’t scare you enough I will repeat it just so you can gauge the severity of this warning—do not pre prepare your essays. Unless you genuinely want to fail HSC English there is no excuse for going into your English exams with one memorised essay for each unit you have studied. Everyone wants a simple solution for writing band six essays that will be easier to learn than an entire year’s worth of work, but like everything in life, nothing good will ever come of taking the easiest route.
Students in years prior to the 2009 HSC may have got lucky, and their memorised essays may have been enough for them to pass, but unfortunately for students in the era of the new syllabus, the same tricks do not work. Every year, the board of studies publishes markers comments and other documents in which they give feedback about the quality of students’ responses from the previous year, and the most common comment is that markers know when they are reading a pre prepared response and punish students for attempting this. It is very easy to tell an essay that actually answers the question from one that is a generic essay about the topic that may just refer to the question in the introduction or conclusion.
The post 2009 HSC English course is designed to stump students who try to pre prepare responses. The board of studies is determined to fight back at criticisms that the HSC is simply a memory test and students that rote learn and churn out content can get better marks than students that actually learn and understand the content. They want you to realise that the course is so broad that there’s no chance your one memorised essay will answer the question sufficiently so there’s no point trying. You only have to look at the uproar caused by the 2009 paper one essay question for evidence of this. For the first time, this question asked students to refer to ONE instead of TWO related texts, and so students that had memorised essays were forced to adapt or were penalised for not writing in enough detail about their one text. The lesson from this is simple; the board of studies is out to get students who memorise essays, so just don’t do it. Ever.
Luckily for you lazy students out there, you will have this guide that should help you to write good essays from scratch that will get you decent marks in your HSC!
Personally, I memorise (very loosely) thesis statements and body paragraphs because I can’t organise my thoughts into a coherent essay structure. I know my texts well and analyse them to death but freeze up when I start from scratch under pressure and I end up with a 2 paragraph essay in 40 mins. I see memorising as another form of preparation.
Memorizing whole paragraphs is not always a bad thing-it definitely depends on how you learn and your abilities in writing essays under pressure. I think as long as you don’t limit yourself to only learning three body paragraphs from one generic essay you have written, you will be fine!
I disagree with not having an essay pre-prepared.
As the above, not everyone is adept with the perfect English skills. Everyone learns differently, and so you can’t expect everyone to be able to answer directly to a response. Some people can’t do this. There are people that aren’t natural writers. There are people all though they have tried to become fluent writers, are still yet to grasp the skills. Some people are naturally good at English. There is a giant imbalance in the English skills of everyone.
I think the whole concept of examinations is rigged. Everyone has a different learning style. How can one accurately test the knowledge of one’s abilities if everyone thinks differently?
to be honest, it is not difficult to memorise 12 qoutes and adapt a question to suite the ideas you associate with those quotes. people who go in with memorised answers just need to practice writing more essays, i see it as a sign of laziness because you can only write one essay. im doing my hsc and every past exam/essay i’ve done, i have just known my quotes and the idea that COULD be associated with them and i’ve achieved high marks. i have written countless essays and it is the only way you will develop. you can’t just memorise everything in life, you have to be able to think and generate things yourself.