How to use GAMSAT sample essays without copying them

A sample essay is most useful as evidence of the decisions one writer made, and least useful as text to absorb. Read it to find what the writer chose to do and what that choice cost, then turn each finding into a question you can put to your own essays. Copying a manner of writing and memorising a response both keep the surface of an essay and leave the thinking behind.

What ACER says about borrowed and memorised essays

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) states in its 2026 information booklet that an essay is original only when it responds to the topics supplied on test day. The booklet says every Written Communication response goes through plagiarism checks as part of marking, including checks for AI use and comparison against previously submitted GAMSAT responses. Essays that reuse wording or claims from pre-prepared ones can be flagged as plagiarised, and the booklet names preparation providers as one place such essays come from. A candidate can be flagged without ever having seen the original source, and misconduct clauses may then apply.

The same section says a pre-prepared response, or one that strays from the topic, is given a low score. It also says memorised essays score poorly as a rule and that ACER recommends avoiding the approach.

That wording has two limits worth knowing. It concerns text and statements, so it does not address writing in the manner of an exemplar. It also does not say where a reusable template ends and a pre-prepared response begins. Those are gaps in what ACER has published, and they are not permission. Our reason for avoiding style imitation is a different one. ACER describes the assessment as focused on the quality of thinking and on how ideas are integrated into a response, and a borrowed manner of writing brings none of that thinking with it.

What a score label on a sample essay can and cannot tell you

Some providers publish sample essays labelled by score level. One guide presents five, running from the low 50s to the low-to-mid 80s, and invites you to compare writing styles. Others pair an example task with a suggested outline. The demand makes sense, because a concrete essay answers a question that criteria cannot.

The label, though, is the provider's. ACER's booklet says three independent scorings are made of each response, and its preparation page says its own practice tasks are scored automatically and return a score range along with a percentile band. The ACER material does not describe how a third party arrives at a label or how that label relates to ACER's marking, so we would not treat one as a measurement. Use it as a prompt to ask what differs between two essays. An outline attached to an example task is likewise one writer's answer to one prompt. ACER's criteria list the piece's shape and form among the features considered, and the pages we have do not prescribe a particular form.

Four questions to put to any exemplar

These are our questions, not ACER's. They are meant to be asked of one paragraph at a time.

• Decision: what did the writer commit to, and what did they leave out?
• Development move: after the idea was first stated, how was it extended? An example, a concession, a complication and a change of angle are different moves.
• Paragraph function: what does this paragraph do for the whole essay that no other paragraph does? If it were cut, what would be missing?
• Trade-off: what did this choice cost in a task where you have 30 minutes to plan and write?

The first three overlap with what ACER lists under thought and content (how the task is taken up and built on) and under organisation and expression (the shape the piece takes). The fourth is there because every decision in a timed essay uses words that could have gone elsewhere.

A worked reading, using an invented paragraph

The example below was invented for this article and is not drawn from any examination material. Suppose an essay on the value of public libraries has a second paragraph that opens by granting the opposing view its strongest form: a library's running costs can look hard to justify when budgets are tight. The paragraph then argues that a library is one of the few places a person can spend an afternoon without buying anything, and that this is the value the cost objection leaves out.

Read through the four questions, the decision is to concede an objection and not ignore it. The development move is concession followed by a reframing, not a second supporting example. The paragraph's function is to move the essay from an assertion to a position that has met resistance. The trade-off is that the concession uses space a third idea could have used.

Notice what you should not take from this: a rule to concede then reframe in paragraph two. That would be a template, and it would fit some prompts badly. What carries over is a question for your own draft. Where did my last essay meet an objection, and what did that paragraph do?

Turning the reading into a checklist for your own writing

Start from the questions ACER's preparation page says examiners consider. In our wording, they ask what ideas you developed, how far and how well you explored them, whether the piece is structured and organised, whether the writing is clear and fluent, and whether the language is precise and suited to the topic. Then add the questions your exemplar readings produced, written as checks on your own pages and not as descriptions of the exemplar. Keep the list short enough to answer from one read-through of a draft.

Then put the exemplar away and write a fresh essay on a prompt you have not seen, and run the checklist afterwards. Our reasoning is that reading an exemplar tests whether you recognise a good move, while writing from a checklist makes you produce one without the model in front of you. That is an inference from how recall differs from recognition, and we have no outcome data on it.

Two cautions from ACER's own guidance apply here. It says quality of writing matters far more than length, though only within reason, so an exemplar's length is not a target. There is more on that in what ACER says about essay length, spelling and punctuation. ACER also suggests asking someone else to read your essays, and setting a draft aside for several days before rereading it. If you use an AI tool to question a draft, the argument for keeping the ideas and sentences your own is set out in using AI feedback without handing over the writing. ACER's preparation page also describes its untimed practice version as suited to experimenting with your writing style, so that is the place to try a change.

Where this method falls short

Reading an exemplar this way is slower than copying it, and the payoff comes only after you write something of your own. An exemplar shows one writer's choices. It cannot tell you whether a given choice was the right one or whether it earned marks, and a score label does not settle that either, for the reasons above. The checklist can only be tested on your own essays, and a checklist you never apply is a list of good intentions. ACER's preparation page also says its practice scoring cannot give feedback beyond a score. You may therefore see a result change without seeing which checklist item was responsible.

That leaves a gap no exemplar can close: a checklist tells you what to look for, and it does not show you whether the essay you wrote did it. Verantrix can give structured feedback on a Section 2 essay against a published rubric, which is a way to test a checklist item against your own writing. It does not mark as ACER would and it does not predict a score. Before you try it, write one essay on a prompt you have not seen, run your checklist over it, and note the single change you will make in the next draft.