Achieving an overall English Advanced mark of 90 (1 Viewer)

[bigboybenson]

Hello all,
As the title says, I'd like some advice on how realistic this mark is. (Hop down to the bolded part if you wanna skip the death by text below).
I'm primarily a maths-focused student attending a top-100 (in 2018) Catholic (ugh) school in NSW. For this last round of exams I'm extremely happy to report that I've achieved straight A's, a massive improvement from where I left off in year 11. I'm ranked 3/40 (0.5% off 2nd place) in extension 1 maths, beating every student doing the course for the first time, year 11 accelerants AND repeating year 12 accelerants and Ext 2 students.
I'm doing good in all my subjects, but English and SOR are my weakest ones. I've tackled the compulsory monster that is SOR after I moved to a new teacher, and my marks have improved significantly in this last exam. However my English marks are continuing to be sub-par.
For my first and second exam I achieved a 15 and 16 out of 20 (Comm. Mod and Mod A), however was ranked 51/101 at this time. For this recent Mod C exam I achieved a 21/25 (multi modal presentation), however with an average of 20 this wouldn't improve my ranks much (I haven't gotten them back yet).

For reference, my predicted ATAR before this most recent round of exams was 87. Afterwards, it shot up to ~91.5 (really happy about this).

I've got my sights set on studying Actuarial Studies at Macquarie Uni. I know the ATAR requirement is 97 (and it only gets worse from there) but was looking at alternate pathways. Aside from shutting up, sitting down, and grinding to get 100% in the rest of my exams (which is pretty much impossible for me) to achieve that ATAR, the only alternative I had found (if I don't achieve the 97 ATAR) was to study one year doing a relevant course and units, achieve the required GPA and internally transfer. As near zero adjustment factors apply to Actuarial Studies, I can't rely on them sweet automatic 5 "Catchment" adjustment factors or academic performance adjustment factors to bolster my ATAR. With my current marks, I'm currently set to reach the 10-bonus-point cap for most related courses, but, again, they don't apply to Actuarial Studies.
(Here's my real question, if you wanna skip the waffle/ramble)
That's when I noticed Academic Entry bonus points DO apply to Actuarial Studies (as per the MaqU website - at least for 2019 courses). I'm set to meet the Extension 1 Maths E4 requirement, but the Band 6 English Advanced 90+ requirements are looking a bit out of reach.
How do I improve my English Advanced mark from a ~80 internal (before trials) to a 90 overall? I know the "you can do it! it's easy! just work hard" stuff, but I'm really quite horrible at English. I'm getting coaching for English to replace my awful school teacher, but what I wanna know is: Is this realistic? How would I go about doing so? And does anyone with experience in Actuarial Studies (I know there are quite a few on this website) have any success stories/alternate route stories they can share with me to boost my confidence before hell my trials start next week?
Thanks!

 

[notthedevil]

I got 90 in Adv English last year. I personally found English very methodical in how they wanted people to write essays and analytical responses.
Some general things/tips that helped me the most:
- First, reading a lot of high achieving English essays from past HSC students (from the resources page on Boredofstudies). Really good for understanding what the markers like in the essays.
- Really reallllly sticking to the rubric for each of your modules. These rubrics are essentially like your syllabuses in other subjects, and answers come from linking your analysis back to the rubric. Your examples/quotations from the texts need to be linked to the rubric in some way (this is actually more important than even reading the text, bc you may read your texts 1mil times but then pick shit quotes, making it all a waste of time lol).
- Submitting as many essay drafts to English staff as your school will allow. This is SO essential, like just do it lol, it will help a loooooot. Your basically being straight up told whether what your doing is shit or not, and if it is shit, well then you know and then can easily fix it up with the feedback your given. Repeat this process many times until the feedback isn't really negative anymore.
- Idk if 2019 HSC students do related texts anymore, but if you do, MAKE SURE THEY STICK TO THE RUBRIC for the respective modules!!!! When you choose a related text, it really has to relate back to the module rubric to a great extent, otherwise you will have a hard time writing about it (I know this bc I used a trash related text for Module C despite teachers telling me not to and i got marked down accordingly).
- Uhhhh idk what others have said about essays, but i feel that essay paragraphs need:
- conceptual topic sentence: basically what you are trying to say about the text and rubric, encapsulated in one sentence.
- 3-4 examples/quotations, plus good analysis on each example/quotation (maybe like 1-2 sentences analysis per example/quotation). Your analysis should flow nicely from one part of the paragraph to the next.
- linking ending sentence, that should nicely end your paragraph by linking to the conceptual topic sentence and rubric.
- As for creative writing (I was dogshit at it when I first started, but got better), the best piece of advice is to try emulate a style of creative writing that an author of a fiction piece uses in one of your prescribed texts. It's not stealing, more just getting inspiration from those that are good at creative writing. For example, I used "Brave New World", one of my prescribed texts, as inspo for my creative writing style and it worked a treat. Ask yourself, what did the author of the books your looking at do that makes their writing so good?
- I know creative writing is different to how i was examined on it, but I only had 1 pre-prepared story to go into the exam with because I was confident that it fit the rubric in pretty much every way possible. You need to make your creative writing piece(s) (if you choose to memorise a piece for exam) very broad in that it should address every aspect of the module rubric x2.
- Finally, practice. Practice writing essays in timed conditions to past exam papers. Adapt your creative writing piece/ideas to different creative writing prompts. I know that bc its new HSC syllabus you wont have access to many past papers, so I suggest things like gathering the ones that are available, making up your own questions as per the module rubrics, or even politely asking your teachers to help make up some essay questions (they are there to help!). Also, read over your essay/creative responses to these timed exams, and self-mark them going off the standards you have seen in top-achieving past essays and the feedback your teachers have given you from submitting drafts. It doesn't really help as much if you don't read over these timed responses, I found, because it leaves a lot of silly mistakes unchecked.
- If you have bad handwriting, practice making it good. It's tough, but my handwriting was shit and i did nothing to improve it, and i do regret that a bit lol.

By the way, if you don't get into your course the first time round, and you have to do some sort of internal/external transfer thing, it is okay and totally doable!! Especially if you do first-year subjects that will contribute credits to your dream course, it's almost nothing to worry about. Uni is extremely different from high school and involves much less of HSC-style rote learning methods to do well. It will also probs be easier bc you wont be forced to do English anymore lool.

I didn't get the ATAR for my course (but still got in through bonus point scheme). Even if i didnt get the bonus point scheme, I know now that it's actually fairly easy to do an internal transfer to the course you really want.
I feel like people on this forum and at school make it seem like internal transfers are super difficult and sad and cost you all this time. When in reality, internal transfers are easy as fuck because you're doing subjects you like to get to where you wanna be, and also because uni is a lot less about memorising stuff for exams and more about applied learning (e.g. all my exams these days are open book lmao, not saying they will be for you but it shows that uni is a lot different to HSC). Also, everyone does internal transfers and no one cares about it. They are super commonly done in pursuance of uni courses with ATAR requirements above 95 (source, my course needed 98 and most of my friends are internal transfer/law pathway students).

I wish you luck and I hope this helped a bit