@liamvhogan@aus.social @allrite@masto.allrite.at oh yeah it’s real bad. At a selective school they spend the last 3 months doing 10-30 practice papers, adapting the memorised essay to the question, because the questions are approved by committee and vague as hell, you can always sorta do it. The 99.95 kids have at least 3 different essays, to get a closer fit, might do more than 50 practice essays. I tried to find a middle ground where I knew a fair set of themes and quotes aligned with them, and could argue what was needed using those. But once you’ve done a dozen practice questions, it just feels like memorisation. Especially when you’ve been hating the source text for 7 months by that point. And that wasn’t the winning technique