The Most Personalised BSSS English Tuition, Designed For You.

“For Year 11 and 12 students in Canberra, BSSS English can be a daunting subject and may count towards your ATAR score if you do well in it; although, unlike everywhere else in Australia, it is not compulsory to count English towards your ATAR in Canberra. 

If English isn’t your strong suit; yes, you can rejoice. 

But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put effort into it! In fact, this was my story… 

My Story:

I scored a 56 (almost a D) in English for Term 1 of Year 11, thinking I didn’t have to try for the subject. After all, I wasn’t ‘naturally talented’ in English, so there’s no point… right? 

But after my Term 2 teacher developed my interest in the subject (thank you, Miss J!), I wanted to try my best… and so I did! 

Ultimately, my English course score was almost as good as my Double Specialist Maths course score of 213 (for reference, I consistently scored between 85 – 98 out of 100 after the first session to attain this). 

So, English definitely scales well if you put in the effort. More importantly however, when you enter the real world, you might kick yourself for not taking this opportunity to develop your writing and presenting skills.

Now, my little pep talk aside, let’s get into strategies for acing BSSS English.

What to do during class time:

As each school in Canberra will cover different texts and undergo different assessments, it is very important to pay attention during your English classes – after all, your teachers will be the one making and marking your exams! 

In fact, a lot of teachers slip in hints of what will appear on your exam; and if you pay attention properly, you will never face a situation where you have no idea how to answer your essay question. 

Your teachers will even help your class brainstorm ideas for essay questions through socratic discussions, where you will analyse themes relevant to your assessments. 

To ensure I had all prerequisite knowledge, I would always complete all the work they set with (slightly extreme) detail as the exams will draw from content taught in class. Sometimes, you can even use part of your response to a class homework question in your actual exam!

Assignment Strategies for Creative Responses, Essays, and Orals:

For assignments, your teacher will allow you to submit one draft for review, and they will provide feedback… yes, this is as if they were literally marking your assignment, which is very generous of them. 

This is a golden opportunity to gauge an understanding of how well your assignment response matches the marking criteria. Please, please make sure you use this opportunity well and hand in a finalised version of your draft, such that your teacher can provide feedback on all components of your assignment. 

Exam Strategies for In-Class Essays:

For exams, I recommend reading widely on the themes covered in class, including analysing academic papers on the texts your exam will assess. In my case, I searched up “{Text} {Theme} Analysis Essay” and filtered to only read PDFs, and was able to find excellent papers by doing this. 

I essentially used these papers as A-grade exemplars. 

This will not only provide you with more ideas to use in your essay, but develop your vocabulary – as several of these academic papers use A+ grade language! 

Aside from this, you are allowed to take a quote sheet into the exam. In this sheet, I recommend categorising your quotes according to the paragraph ideas they correspond to, which will help with memorisation. 

My holy grail was to formulate essay questions similar to examples covered in class and write several, detailed practice essays on Google docs. I would also try to fully memorise my best body paragraphs. This method will increase efficiency during your exams (where you are only provided with approximately 80 minutes to write a 1000 words max. essay), providing you with more time to come up with nuanced arguments and review your essay.

These approaches should, of course, be adapted to your preferred learning style;  however, from experience tutoring previous students, these strategies have worked incredibly well for any students in Canberra completing BSSS English.”