VCE students have literally been asked to analyse a big pile of rubbish in this year's English exam.
More than 43,800 students flung their pens to desks on Wednesday afternoon and shuffled out of examination rooms, many relieved that their first exam was over.
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Students across the state sat their year 12 English exam Wednesday - so we asked them what was hard, and how they did.
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Students across Victoria sit English exam
Students across the state sat their year 12 English exam Wednesday - so we asked them what was hard, and how they did.
Section C – which often throws a curveball at Year 12s – asked students to analyse a principal's newsletter about the dangers of plastic packaging. It was accompanied by a black and white image of mounds of black garbage bags.
Head of English at Shelford Girls' Grammar Daniela Ouzecky said this section was more conservative than the previous year's unseen text analysis, which included a cartoon of a giant watermelon that confused some students.
"The visual in this one is basically a mountain of rubbish," she said. "That is the image they want students to be able to see but it still offers an opportunity for stronger kids if they talk about it being an apocalyptic image. It looks like the end of the world."
Fitzroy High School VCE team leader John Hinman said the best students would have contrasted the school's logo of a tree with the image of the garbage.
They would have also pointed out that the newsletter was delivered to its audience in an environmentally friendly online format, which backed up the principal's argument.
But the talking point for students was fictional principal Denise Walker's hatred of tomato sauce containers, which she fumed were "lethal if flipped in your eye".
This spawned dozens of memes on social media and a video of one VCE student squirting the condiment onto his face.
Collingwood College VCE programs leader Euan Morton said the exam was relatively straight-forward.
"There are no surprises...the best kids are going take this and smash it," he said.
Finishing the exam was a little anti-climactic for Fitzroy High School student Stella Bridie.
"You spend the whole year building up to one day," she said.
"Then you go out [of the exam] and there's all this stuff in your brain that you're never going to have to think about."
The 18-year-old wrote about how social inequality between men and women manifested itself in characters in The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Her classmate Josh Van Eymeren said the exam was long and difficult. "It's a task, that's for sure," he said.
Relief for the year 12 students of Our Lady of Mercy College in Heidelberg after Wednesday's VCE English exam. Photo: Jason South
Collingwood College student Caleb Williams Jackson said he had prepared for most questions. "I was lucky," he said.
"It's hard because of how much you write in a small amount of time. But the prompts were easy."
At Our Lady of Mercy College in Heidelberg, relieved students poured out of their exam room just after 12.15pm.
"I forgot to analyse the picture!," exclaimed one girl, referencing the image of garbage bags. .
"I can't wait to see the memes," said another, while checking Facebook to see if anyone had posted on social media about the exam yet.
Co-captain Lucy Bandiera, 18, said her friends were planning a bonfire ceremony to burn their text but she planned to keep hers.
"I did enjoy the texts but probably all the practice essays will get burned," she said.
The prompts for the text analysis took her by surprise. Her text was Selected Poems by John Donne.
"I was looking for the key word 'love' but it wasn't there. So I panicked a little bit," she said.
Charlotte Fernandes, 17, said parts of the exam took her off guard but she still thought she did OK.
"The prompts were not really something that we talked about much in class. But after you think about it for a while you can get there."
Victorian Association for the Teaching of English president Emily Frawley said it was a fair, accessible exam.
"It's good to see that the questions are designed to help students show their knowledge of the texts," she said. "Many questions in this year's exam invite students to give a close textual analysis of structure, language, ideas and issues."
English is the most popular VCE exam and widely considered one of the most nerve-racking, because it is the only compulsory subject and prerequisite for many tertiary courses.
The three-hour exam is split into three sections – an analytical interpretation of a text, a comparative analysis of two texts and an analysis of how argument and language are used in an unseen text.
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