Oh my jeebus, another food student on the forums??!??! Hello!! It's so nice to see another Food student on the forums here.
I did Food last year, and yeah, the exam was hard to finish because there was soooo much to write. No one saw it coming tbh because the sample was fairly okay with how much it required us to write, and the practice exams were all relatively short. The entire state must've felt the same though cause I somehow still ended up with a sexy 40+ despite leaving the 10 marker blank ...
(the exam is out of 100 for reference)
Here's some tips:
- Try and find some resources other than the textbook. It's quite frankly terrible. I'm not going to name names but there's only one so you should know what I'm talking about. It's either 1) irrelevant to the study design, 2) factually incorrect, or 3) written for the food technology study design (don't know if this was intentional but it seriously felt like it). I'm not saying that it's without merit, but try and supplement it with something else because it by itself will only get you so far. Apparently Edrolo now has Food in their subject catalogue, so maybe that if your school has it? A+ notes was also good. I would advise against the checkpoints though - most of it was either paraphrased or copy-pasted from the textbook, and only some of the questions were good. The textbook questions were enough if you wanted something to test your knowledge.
- SACs were a mix bag (so most of my advice may not be even applicable to you for most of the year lol). Each one was split into a related practical and theoretical component though. Practicals were essentially cooking a recipe, and theoretical included stuff like (this might change though since schools now have a past exam to go off on) doing a dietary and sensory analysis on organic vs non-organic foods (we did it on weetbixs, without milk
), media analysis (reading a food-related article - ours was on sugary drinks - and answering questions about it), or a plain, simple question and answer test. My advice for practicals is to do a production plan and annotate the recipe beforehand so everything goes smoothly. You could even cook the recipe beforehand, but most of the recipes we had required weird, exotic ingredients, so unless you can find them I wouldn't bother. For the theoretical part (and the exam too), my advice would be to overwrite, within time constraints of course. Food's general marking scheme is 1 mark per overall point, regardless of how long the point may be. For example, a 2 mark question could be "explain the environmental impacts of food wastage"; a response like "most wasted food often ends up in landfills, where they then emit the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. This contributes to climate change and global warming, leading to devastating effects like biodiversity loss and soil acidifcaiton" would only get 1 mark even though there's multiple parts to the answer.
- Do practice questions, especially for the exam! The exam was like a HHD exam, in that the concepts are easy so the only thing that differentiates you is how you answer the questions. Do them and get them marked (this is the !!important part!!, only way you're going to improve). I'm currently in the process of collating VCAA-style questions, based off the sample and 2017 exam, and will be posting them here shortly.
- Choose an easy recipe if you're given an design-based SAC (where you get to choose what you cook; we did). Unless there's an explicit criteria for creativity, I wouldn't go for exotic or unusual ingredients and use super technical techniques just for the sake of creative and cooking flair. Trust me, I did this in year 11 and it was so much unnecessary stress and time wasted during production.
- Do everything based off the study design, past exams and examiner's report for the exam (maybe SACs too depending on how your school runs them). This is applicable to every VCE subject, but especially for Food because most of the resources I've found so far deviate way too much from VCAA.
- For questions, spell out your thinking!! This is a common way food students lose marks; they're super brief with their answers because they just assume that the markers know certain things. Do not assume anything!! This happens a lot in Food because most of the content is common knowledge or common sense.
- A follow on from my previous point, and to put it in the most eloquent way possible, food is half bullshit, half content knowledge. There's some stuff that you have to study and memorise, but for the most part, you can make most of the stuff up. For example, one of the questions from last year's exam was along the lines of "what's the social role of food?"
- Don't memorise definitions - they won't ask you to define X term (well, at least for the exam).
I'll probably add more than to that ^^ later once more comes to mind, but for now, good luck for Food this year!! The fact that you've taken the intitative to start this thread is a pretty good indicator that you're going to do amazing!! If you have any questions even remotely food related (doesn't have to be about VCE Food Studies), please don't hesitate to chuck them my way. I'm a serious foodie so I'll be more than happy to answer them.
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