HSC marks = half HSC exams + half formal assessments

Around 40 years ago, the HSC moved from a mere examination mode to a hybrid system, where half the marks came from the HSC examinations and the other half from formal assessment tasks spread across Year 12. The intention at the time was to reduce the stress of examinations on which everything depended and to allow good students who struggled with examinations to have other means of achievement. It is a moot point as to whether the assessment system has reduced stress or merely spread it across a longer time. Moreover, the use of external tutors and, more recently, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), has led teachers everywhere to structure assessment tasks undertaken in the teachers’ presence under exam conditions, thereby removing much of the richness and diversity from the HSC assessment program.

Preliminary and HSC Courses

The ‘new’ HSC requires students to undertake a Preliminary Course, which for all intents and purposes is Year 11, followed by the HSC Course, which is essentially Year 12. The boundary between the two is that each must have sufficient indicative hours (time spent) in instructional time to qualify students for the HSC. Accordingly, the actual examinable program, both in terms of work taught and instructional hours, goes from first term Year 11 until the end of third term or early fourth term Year 11, and Year 12 from the end of Year 11 until the end of Term 3 in Year 12. Late in Term 3, Year 12 students who have undertaken practical or performance course works (such as Design and Technology, Industrial Technology, Music, Visual Arts) or major submissions (such as Society and Culture’s Personal Interest Project (PIP), English Extension 2 Creative work, History Extension’s essay) have their work either internally marked or sent off to examiners, depending on the subject.

How many units do students need to study?

The rules from NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) who conducts the HSC require students to study 12 units (usually six 2 unit subjects) in the Preliminary Course and 10 units in the HSC Course, providing those units have been studied at Preliminary level or are extensions of subjects studied. NESA supports schools adding their own requirements according to their ethos. For Covenant, this means our mandatory Knowing God course. The HSC offers Extension courses in English, Mathematics, History, Music, Community Languages and more recently Science. The reason for these subjects rather than others appears largely political. English and Mathematics Extension 1 are taught in the Preliminary Course as well as the HSC Course, while their Extension 2 subjects and other Extension 1 courses are taught in the HSC course. Students therefore have the option of dropping a 2 unit course at the end of Year 11 to go from 12 units to 10 units, or dropping 2 subjects and picking up 2 Extension courses. Generally speaking, students who can cope with Extension courses and are looking for a strong ATAR, are advised to take up these courses as they scale well.

The statistical adjustment of student results

At the end of the HSC, NESA moderates (statistically adjusts) student results. Their intention is to achieve the proverbial level playing field. As an outcome, the number of assessment marks available for distribution to a school’s candidature in a course is made to equal the number of marks those students achieved in HSC examinations. This is to prevent in-school mark inflation, or the opposite problem, draconian marking. NESA will not, however, change the rank order of the students from the school’s submission. It is therefore incumbent on schools to get this right, as to grade students in their actual order of achievement (as distinct from ability or potential) and have the appropriate gaps between them as NESA will maintain these proportions. Accordingly, HSC marks are a moderated amalgam of HSC exams and formal assessment tasks. It is not possible for students to uncover the raw marks. Further, it is not entirely legitimate to compare Band 6 from one year to the next, as the ‘cut’ scores, for instance between 89 and 90 as the boundary from Band 5 and Band 6 are established anew each year by ‘judges’, that is, very experienced teachers from somewhere in the state deployed for this task. Their role is to work out the boundary according to the published criteria of what represents Band 6 and what represents Band 5, that is reflected in the raw marks which will on adjustments represent the cut scores which form the division between one band and another.

Does an ATAR of 50 equal a pass?

This may seem complex enough, but wait, there is more! After years of trying to persuade the community that 50 does not represent a pass whereas 49 is a fail, NESA and its precursor gave up and massaged the marks such that 98% of students of a course will score more than 50%. In fact, it is impossible to fail the HSC if students undertake the assessment tasks with due diligence and make a serious and genuine attempt at the examinations. Testifying to the first of these criteria sits with the principal of each school.

Is the ATAR a mark out of 100 or a place in the state?

However, there is a pressure point and a source of deep misunderstanding as HSC marks from NESA are transferred to the Universities Admission Centre (UAC) to establish students’ ATARs (Australian Tertiary Assessment Rank). When parents sat the HSC, the UAC may well have been known as the TER (Tertiary Education Rank) or UAI (University Admission Index). The problem arises for several reasons: the ATAR, being expressed out of 100, looks like a mark but is actually a place in the state. Accordingly, the highest ATAR is 99.95, on which approximately 50 students will tie each year. The next ATAR is 99.90, then 99.85, each with multiple students. The ATAR is not stretched over a 50-point scale, which is essentially true of the HSC, but over 100 points from 0 – 99.95. This puts a downward pressure on HSC marks as they convert to ATAR’s. It means that while the average HSC mark is about 75, the average ATAR is about 50. But this is not all! ATARs are made up for all students who commenced Year 7 with the HSC cohort each year, even though around 30% of them have left school! The good news here, for students who persevere to Year 12, is that they automatically outscore those who have left.

The best advice when choosing subjects

UAC then turns its attention to attempt to maintain a level playing field. Obviously, some subjects and courses are more difficult than others. Accordingly, 70% in a difficult subject may be worth more in terms of academic attainment than 90% in a much easier course or subject, such as the proverbial ‘underwater basket weaving’. For this reason, UAC enters into its high-powered computers what every student has achieved in the subjects they have sat. They then use this data to calculate notionally what every student in the state would have achieved if they sat every subject offered. This enables UAC to determine statistically which subjects are more difficult (they have very able candidature), so they can be inflated or maintained at their notional value while others are scaled down. Which subjects are scaled up or down is an annual exercise. However, it is fair to say that subjects which travel best through scaling over the years have tended to be Extension 1 and 2 Mathematics, Extension 1 and Advanced English, Physics, Chemistry and Economics. Why then doesn’t everybody choose these subjects to maximise their ATARs? The answer is that students who could not manage these subjects would not prosper and so these subjects would lose their scaling advantage. The best advice is for students to choose subjects in which they are interested and in which they have aptitude. It also needs to be said that motivated students taught by a skilled teacher can score very well in subjects that generally don’t scale very well, as being at the top of the candidature means they are largely unaffected by scaling.

The incentive to applying oneself to study

Each year school principals are sent a report from the UAC Technical Committee on Scaling. It is technical! The main learning from it is that on HSC scores there is a bunching between 70 and 80. Over recent years, this has translated as follows: the ATAR gap between a student who achieves an average HSC result of 70 across all his or her subjects and an average of 80 is obviously 10 marks, however the ATAR difference between these has, depending on the year, been between 16 and 27 ATAR points. As the ATAR is a place and not a mark, it follows that students who need a high ATAR for their preferred university and course need to be positioned at the front of the pack (around 77,000 HSC students) rather than in the middle. This is an incentive for really applying oneself to study.

Benefits and disadvantages of early offers

Recent developments have seen universities make early offers before the ATARs are released, based on Trial HSC exams or even Year 11 results. This is best seen as gazumping by universities, as they try to lock in the best students early, partly because this will improve their eventual international rankings, but also because they are funded on the number of their students. Principals almost entirely oppose early offers, mostly because of their effect: too often, once guaranteed a place, students ease off the pace of their studies and underperform. This is particularly problematic as most offers are dependent on a minimum ATAR, but also because students may change their minds about what they wish to study and therefore need to depend on their ATAR.

A word of caution about Band 6s and League Tables

A further point needs to be made, and that is about the Band 6 media industry. Some years ago, NESA’s predecessor responded to a media Freedom of Information Inquiry about HSC results. The then President of the Board of Studies (now NESA) tried to fob them off with something he thought trivial and inconsequential. He gave them the Band 6 results of each school. The media have built these into a school quality proxy, affirming the nearly 50 selective, or partially selective, government and independent schools at the top of league tables, as one would expect given the quality of the candidature.

The League Tables do not measure value added, that is, from the starting point of Year 7 until exit at the end of Year 12. On this basis, a disadvantaged school may move students forward appreciably, over the years, even more so than a selective school, despite the disadvantaged school possibly ranking poorly on the League Tables. Schools which slide down in the tables from one year to the next are then outed and shamed. A school I previously led slid down the Band 6 tables at the very time the students’ ATARs increased. How was that possible? Those students characteristically scored a large number of Band 5’s (80 – 89%) in difficult subjects which scaled well, rather than low Band 6s in subjects and courses which were ‘hammered’ by scaling. The ranking of schools has no official status; they are important only because people think they are important and therefore they have marketing and ‘feel good’ value. Some schools game the system by pushing students into easier courses to maximise Band 6s, which sadly, minimise those students’ ATARs.

As of the end of 2024, schools now receive the ATARs from UAC, which prevents employing highly paid statisticians to work them out from first principles. It is these, and student destinations (universities, private colleges, TAFE) which are the real measures of academic outcomes. Given the number of rounds of university offers, from December to February, schools don’t usually have this information much before the end of Term 1 the following year.

The value of experience

How can Interim Principal Dr Collier know all of this I hear you ask? I have a been a principal for 37 years and had the honour of representing the independent sector as Chair of the Academic Committee for nearly a decade. This is all very complex! It needs careful reading to assimilate. This is important in order to guide one’s children.

All of the issues canvased above are predicated on the notion that the main or even sole purpose of education is to maximise one’s HSC results and ATAR. There is no denying this is very important, but is it the whole purpose? Increasingly, quality schools (like Covenant) seek to build wholistically into young people, not only head but heart and hands also. Character matters! Within our Christian framework we wish to build into young people such as they can flourish and increase in maturity in Christ. Or as Paul puts it in Ephesians 4:13, “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” Now that’s an aim!

Regards,

Dr John Collier

Interim Principal