The 2026 VCE exam timetable.
Written exams run Tuesday 27 October to Wednesday 18 November 2026, and English sits first: English and EAL open the timetable on the morning of 27 October. The English-subject dates are below, with the rest of the period's key windows — drawn from VCAA's published timetable.
The English exams
The rest of the period
What the gap between now and October is for
English sitting first is not a scheduling accident — it is the one exam almost every VCE student sits, so the timetable clears the day for it. It also means English preparation has a hard horizon: whatever a student’s text knowledge, analysis and essay craft are going to be, they are that by the last week of October, with no second morning.
The useful reading of the timetable is backwards. Three hours and fifteen minutes on 27 October rewards what was built across the preceding months — the habits of close reading, planning under time, and sentence-level control that don’t appear in a final fortnight. Eleven years of VCAA’s own examiner reports say the recurring failures are exactly those habits, not text knowledge. That is the work weekly one-to-one VCE English tutoring actually does, and it is also why the school calendar matters as much as the exam one — where the remaining school terms fall decides how many working weeks are really left.