Planning the VCE commerce pathway, Years 11 and 12

Business Management, Accounting, Economics and Legal Studies are often chosen together. Each has four units. Units 1 and 2 are usually taken in Year 11, and Units 3 and 4 in Year 12 as a sequence, which is where school-assessed coursework and the end-of-year exam come in.

That structure suggests how to plan the two years.

Treat Year 11 as the base for Year 12

Units 1 and 2 are not a rehearsal. The ideas return in Units 3 and 4 in greater depth: how a business sets objectives, how financial data is recorded and analysed, how markets respond, how the law resolves a dispute. A student who has secured the Year 11 ideas starts Year 12 with room to apply them.

Look for the links between the studies

• Business Management and Accounting both ask how a business makes and records decisions, from different angles.
• Economics and Business Management both look at the conditions a business operates in.
• Legal Studies and Business Management meet where businesses have obligations and disputes.

Seeing those links lets a student reuse an example across studies, and it makes revision shorter.

Plan by unit, then by area of study

Each unit is divided into areas of study with their own outcomes. A useful habit is to keep one page per area of study, written by the student, with the key ideas, one worked example and the questions they still find hard. That page becomes the revision resource.

What Schanion does for this pathway

The app knows whether a student is in Year 11 or Year 12 and shows the right focus unit, current topic and planner items. Each study has a two-year pathway map, so students, parents and teachers can see where a student is and what comes next. The sample content for these studies is a starting point that subject teachers need to review, and the unit titles should be checked against the current VCAA study designs before they are used with students.

A student who can see the whole two years tends to plan better than one who sees only this week. That is the idea behind the map, and it is one you can use without any software at all. If you want to see it working, open the demonstration and sign in as one of the commerce students.