The VCE Year 12 Biology exam is over for another year - congratulations to you, and to your students for their hard work.
Now, to the dissection - and not the Biological type, I mean exam dissection.
Let’s start with the general structure. Experienced teachers will have recognised the familiar exam structure of the Biology exam: 40 multiple-choice questions ordered by the study design, followed by 80 marks of short-answer questions, totalling 120 marks. The exam is designed to assess and rank students on their understanding across all areas of study, including the key science skills.
The questions range from factual recall (mild) to application and reasoning (medium), to more demanding cognitive processes such as synthesising (spicy). Complexity of the questions is created through the stimulus provided, the command terms used, the number of marks required, and the cognitive processes demanded.
Now let’s look at what’s really going on inside the 2024 exam.
This was a heavily skills-based exam. Students who’d rote learnt facts might have been disappointed as this exam required a lot of skills application. This isn’t a big surprise - there is a continuing trend towards requiring higher order thinking in assessments in the senior years across every state in Australia. Students can no longer simply rote learn concepts, they need to be able to apply their knowledge, often to unfamiliar scenarios and contexts.
The 40-question multiple-choice questions in this year’s exam play out pretty much as expected. Section B, requiring short answers is where we see things get harder.
Let’s take question 10 in Section B - the final question in the exam as an example. The question is worth a total of 9 marks, standard for the VCE Biology exam to end on a dramatic investigation question.
In the 2024 exam, students are provided with a scenario related to a student-designed scientific investigation on public education and vaccination decisions. Every single part of the question requires the key science skills as per the breakdown below showing the questions stems from the various parts of Question 10. Theoretically, if you have these skills, you could complete this question, and possibly even get full marks, without even having to have completed the Year 12 Biology course. There are no facts, numbers or concepts a student needs to recall to earn a single mark in this question - everything they need is in front of them - they just need to be able to think like a scientist to bring it all together.
The final exam requires students to think like a scientist. As teachers we know this is a great thing - if students are going to pursue the sciences beyond school, this is going to be essential. But the VCE syllabus is packed, and there is a lot of content that needs to be taught, and learnt. Teaching these Science skills (which together help a student think like a scientist) in one year alongside all of the content just isn’t feasible.
Scientific skills need to be progressively taught from Year 7. So by the time students hit Year 11 and 12, they’ve already built their scientific mind muscles - and they come ready for the kind of application that is increasingly being expected, and assessed in the senior years.
Let’s pull out our scalpels again and dissect the skills required for that 9-mark short answer question from the 2024 exam.
This question relied on students being able to apply different key science skills. At Edrolo, we’ve backwards mapped these skills to Year 7 - where students should be introduced to the foundational scientific method where they can then build on applying the skills in the context of each unit they study. See the example below from the Edrolo Years 7-10 Science skills finder.
Now let’s look at how we’d embed the skills into a Year 10 question. You’ll see this is also an exam-style question to help students get familiar with the style of question they see in an exam. Students are provided with a stimulus. The example below is from Year 10 Natural selection.
These questions require students to align with key science skills such as planning investigations, formulating testable hypotheses, and manipulating variables. By answering these, students transition from basic recall to higher-order thinking, showcasing their ability to not just know facts, but also apply and evaluate them in practical scenarios. This set helps students build the foundational skills needed for exams while training them to recognise and answer questions effectively using structured, scientific approaches.
By systematically and progressively introducing and reinforcing these skills from Year 7 to 10, alongside the increasingly complex theory being learnt (and thus increasingly complex application of the skills to match), students are getting the very foundations they’ll need to ace that 9-marker. And arguably every other question in the exam.
So, as you dissect the exam, and the post mortem continues when you get your VCE VASS data in mid-December, take heart in the fact you’ll have no doubt equipped your students with everything they needed to know for the exam. Knowing however isn’t enough, and to really level up results needs a whole-of-Science faculty collaboration to embed skills from Year 7 - so scientific thinkers walk into Year 11, and future scientists leave Year 12.
My Science teaching colleagues at Edrolo have spent the last 3 years building a skills-focused system for teaching science from Years 7-10, email [email protected] if you’d love to take a look - I’d be happy to show it to you.
