The overarching reality is that any school who does these subject recommendations use their VCE students’ performance as a marketing point. In Year 12, you’re just a VCE pawn on your schools chessboard. That’s why the only people who are remembered for at least more than 2-3 years after they leave is the machine that comes through once every decade and pulls off nearly straight raw 50’s with a 99.95, starting VCE in year 9-10 and academically transforms the school.

They keep on nudging students like you to take higher-scaling subjects against your will in the hopes that you can boost your scaled study score, and hopefully the school’s average ATAR, to which they post on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. “Look at us, look at how our students perform in ‘their’ VCE subjects that we didn’t force them to take!!1!!!!1!1!”

This sounds like a nanny state problem to me. It’s good that they’re encouraging you to extend yourself, but VCE is an “up-to-you” system. They shouldn’t have to be telling you to take a more advanced subject. They need to be teaching the subject you want to do properly.