Something in the order of 3000 people apply for the Victorian Selective Entry Examination.
Approximately 20% receive entry.
The math necessitates certain disappointment for the majority of exam candidates. Your child (or you) may be one of the unfortunate many.
Here is a quick guide on handling Selective Entry disappointment as a family.
Allow you and your child to feel the full magnitude of your disappointment without channeling it to any particular blame source.
Often, moments of academic disappointment (this certainly will not be the last!) are rife with euphemisms by well-meaning family, friends and teachers.
“It’s just an exam!”
“Selective schools weren’t worth it anyway!”
“This means nothing.”
While well-intentioned, and while they do harken to some essential truth, they trivialise what was, at some point, a closely-held ambition.
It was just an exam, but it was perhaps one you hung significant hopes on.
Plenty of great people do emerge from non-Selective School, but perhaps you imagined (with rose tints) rolling up to the impressive Gothic castle of Melbourne High School at 8.30 AM every weekday.
It is utterly normal and expected to contend with ill-feeling in the context of a perceived academic “failure” (though I will shortly make the case for why this word is a misnomer here).
Do not transform this feeling into a point of discipline towards the exam-taker. They were either:
a) as invested into this exam as the parent (if not more), and contending with existential feelings of shame, guilt and disappointment OR
b) not at all invested in Selective Entry in which case the parent/s were misguidedly living vicariously through their child.
Reinforcing negative feeling with parent-to-child disciplinary action or blame will propagate into an unhealthy learning partnership in the forthcoming years of a child’s academic life.
Controversial opinion: your goal as a learner is to fail as fast and frequently as possible.
The word “failure” is a grim term I’m careful to steer clear of in educational contexts, particularly vis a vis high school students.
Failure is permanent. Failure sticks like a bad stench. Failure implies genetic deficit. Failure is an abyss from which there is no reclamation.
Eradicate failure from your vocabulary.
There is a binary psychological concept that proposes people fall into one of two states of mind: a growth mindset or a fixed mindset.
A learner with a growth mindset views skills and abilities as learnable via effort. They say sentences like:
“This exam may not have gone my way, but it has opened my eyes to the skills I need to develop to perform comparably to or better than those who did enter a Selective School in 1-3 years.”
A learner with a fixed mindset views their deficits as unchangeable and rigid. They say sentences like:
“I have never been good at tests. I will never perform at the level of the students who entered Selective Schools this year.”
Taking into view all of the skills, competencies and characteristics of a learner (i.e. ability to do calculus, pattern recognition, attention span etc.), a growth mindset is the single most valuable weapon in a student’s mental arsenal.
A student with a growth mindset will learn more from every “failure” than a student with a fixed mindset who appears to succeed in exams.
Given this is true, the goal of a student is to develop a growth mindset then fail as fast and hard as possible.
Your goal as a learner is to fail as fast and frequently as possible.
In the context of the Selective Entry examination, view this exam as a proxy for all the other exams a student can be expected to do.
Consider this exam a blip; a minor detour.
What steps can you take now to set yourself up for the next few years of your academic life? Here are some scenarios that may apply to you:
Sometimes it is difficult to zero in on exactly where your skill deficits are.
P.S. If you have used Hatchery, this is fairly straightforward. Simply view your skills in ascending order (low to high) from your dashboard and devise strategies to improve each one.
The Selective Entry exam is simply one step in a life of learning that stretches from pre-school development, to formalised primary / high school education, to tertiary and / or vocational education.
In the context of high school education, your child will sit the NAPLAN (the Australian national standardised literacy and numeracy exam), internal school examinations and finally the end of Year 12 examinations (VCE/HSC) for university entry.
Taking a growth mindset view to this journey, it is in your best interests to channel the temporary disappointment of Selective School non-entry into preparing yourself for future hurdles.
Exams will be fast and frequent, especially if your child has university ambitions. Although these exams seem, on the surface, markedly differently, they all rest on a similar set of skills and competencies that can be matured from a young age.
Take a bird’s eye view on this long quest of self-improvement.
Firstly, this will be psychologically liberating. It is relieving to know that no single exam is the be-all-and-end-all of your future aspirations.
Secondly, recognise that by replenishing core skill deficits (such as the ones mentioned in the previous section), you will fortify a tapestry of abilities that will serve you well in every exam you ever sit, irrespective of subject area.
Thirdly, acknowledge that exams like the Selective Entry examination are not zero-sum games. Not receiving an offer does not render your child’s development over the last 6-18 months naught.
Even without the tangible end-result of a Selective School offer, this process has been a useful exercise in learning time management, stress management, exam psychology, shoring up content gaps and simulating the pressures of future examinations.
For your family, this exam was a gentle benchmarking. With a growth mindset, you now have a sense of where you are with respective to fellow high-performing students.
Perform a psychological autopsy on where your gaps were (with respect to psychology and skills, more than content) and fortify yourself for a life of learning ahead.
Moreover, manage your expectations. If you recognise disappointment as a learning opportunity, you will necessarily become hungry for more opportunities to “fail”.
“Fail” when “failing” is relatively inconsequential, so you can succeed when it is consequential.
Fail hard and fast, my brethren.