Veni, vidi, VCE: How a dead language helps students get top marks

Latin may be a dead language, but it’s alive and well in classrooms across the state – and it can help students score a top ATAR mark.

It’s thanks to scaling, which the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre says is used to make a fair comparison between the same score in different subjects. The process adjusts scores based on how difficult it is to achieve the median mark in a subject.

“To scale a subject, we look at the results of everyone doing that subject, and how they scored in all of their other VCE subjects,” a VTAC spokesman said.

When someone studies chemistry for example, they look at the chemistry students’ results in their other subjects. If chemistry students performed above average in other subjects, that means chemistry was competitive, so it would be harder to get the average score.

Melbourne Grammar School students Georgios Pirpiris and Michael Wang said they didn’t consider how Latin was scaled when they first picked it.

“I knew about [scaling] but I wouldn’t say it was the main thing that made me decide to do the subject,” Wang said.

Pirpiris said his older brother studied Latin when he was in high school and encouraged him to give it a go.

“I speak Greek at home, and Greek and Latin are quite connected historically so I thought I’d extend that and see what it holds,” he said.

The school’s head of Latin, Sarah Durham, has been teaching it for more than 20 years, in Australia and the UK. Despite perceptions that it’s irrelevant, it is popular with students, she said.

“They can make so many different links across the curriculum,” she said, adding one student drew inspiration from his Latin coursework to help him in his English VCE subject.

Former Geelong College student Emmy Bowyer is in her second year of medicine at Monash University and studied Latin from years 9 to 12.

It wasn’t something she initially considered, but a teacher used her love of the popular Percy Jackson book series – Percy learnt Latin at school – to convince her to try it.

She urged others considering taking it on not to look at how it was scaled, but to see if they actually enjoyed it.

“The scaling was a lovely boost, but it’s a hard subject, so I think it’s justified,” she said.

The average VCE study score is 30, according to VTAC. It is used as a reference point because scaling adjustments are largest at the average score and decrease in size towards extremes of the scale.

“The scaling process means that a 30 in one subject is just as hard or easy to achieve as a 30 in every other subject,” according to the spokesman.

If someone received a study score of 30 in Latin, that would get scaled up to a score of 47. Other subjects that are scaled highly include specialist mathematics, algorithmics (HESS) – a subject equivalent to a first-year university unit – and languages such as Hebrew, French and Chinese (as a second language).

Languages are also scaled slightly differently, as a result of a government policy to encourage students to study them.

In Victoria, fewer than 300 students study Latin, with just 24 schools offering the subject.

For specialist mathematics, about 3500 students are enrolled in the state. One of them is Trinity Grammar School student Alex Chieng.

The 17-year-old said he knew many students did consider how a VCE subject was scaled before picking it, but that’s not why he chose specialist mathematics.

The year 12 student, who is aiming to get into engineering at university, said it was always a subject he would pick but acknowledged it was daunting to take on.

“For me, it’s been a challenging subject, but also one of the most rewarding, so I’m not thinking ‘the scaling is getting me through this right now’,” he said. “[The scaling is] honestly a nice bonus for me.”

But Chieng said for those who wanted to get the top ATAR mark of 99.95, it was difficult without doing a subject that was scaled up significantly.

“It’s not impossible, but it is more difficult without these very high scaling subjects,” he said.

Chieng said many other students did pick specialist maths because of how it was scaled, but he has a tip for those considering what to study.

“I know it’s a cliché and everyone says it, but pick the subjects you think you really, really like, and look at scaling if maybe there’s two subjects which you like equally, and you’re not really sure what to do,” he said.

VTAC said the biggest misconception around scaling was that it reflected how easy or difficult a subject’s curriculum was.

“The scaling process is about the level of competition in the entire subject, so it’s not about you, your class, or your school,” the spokesman said.

“Every VCE student who gets a particular study score in a particular subject will get the same scaled score,” the spokesman said.

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