This is part three of an ongoing commentary begun in 2021 and continued in 2022.

The current HSC grading model is unfair –  well past its use-by-date.  It was adopted at the turn of the millennium, way before recent HSC students were even born. 

Now, many schools are gaming the system to maximise the percentage of Band 6 results and consequent rankings. That’s to the detriment of the availability, uptake and performance in STEM subjects. While I present a lot of doom and gloom stemming from my research (with some silent partners), I also offer some easy solutions that will even save time and money.

The doom and gloom

Every year, the Sydney Morning Herald releases its ‘HSC Honour Roll’ of the Merit List of every NSW student with a top Band 6 in a subject (‘Distinguished Achievers’). It includes the top students in a course (‘Top Achievers’) and the NSW Premier’s List of ‘All Rounders’ who achieved Band 6 in 5+ subjects. 

The Honour Roll figures then feed into the notorious high school ranking league tables. But this marketer’s dream is being manipulated and weaponised in the highly competitive high school education industry, to the detriment of STEM subjects in particular. 

Firstly, students studying vocational education subjects such as Electrotechnology are ineligible for the All Rounders accolade. 

More fundamentally, while the ATAR scales subjects like the sciences favourably, the HSC is stacked against students studying a science.

Before you look at my graph below, please note the following:

There are four unequal quadrants in the graph:

• Top Left: relatively difficult as a subject, with only a low fraction of students awarded Band 6 = only Chemistry, Physics, Science Extension and Economics
• Top Right: relatively difficult as a subject, but with a high fraction of students awarded Band 6 = French Extension, plus Maths Extension 1 & 2 and Latin Continuers which are off the scale
• Bottom Left: relatively easy as a subject, but with only a low fraction of students awarded Band 6 = subjects such as Ancient History, Business Studies, Investigating Science, PDHPE, Community & Family Studies, Food Tech and more
• Bottom Right: relatively easy as a subject, and with a high fraction of students awarded Band 6 = most of the languages (most of which are off the scale), plus subjects such as Dance, Drama, Music (1, 2 and Extension), Textiles & Design, and Visual Arts 

This graph shows ‘difficulty’ against ‘percentage Band 6’ for every subject that contributed to all Honour Roll awards in 2023. 

As a proxy for difficulty, I used the Universities Admissions Centre (UAC) scaled score for an HSC score of 90 in each subject. UAC scales subjects, essentially according to difficulty, in order to determine student ATARs. In HSC, an overall mark of 90 in a subject is the baseline for a Band 6. English Advanced is used as a baseline for comparison since all students have to study English in some form and English has to contribute to a student ATAR. 

English Standard awards little to none

Notice English Standard awards little to no Band 6, which is an issue in itself – some schools game the Honour Roll and ranking system by only letting their students study English Advanced, even if they’re better suited to English Standard. As UAC states “since NESA places English Studies, English Standard and English Advanced raw marks on a common scale, these courses are combined and scaled as a single course but are reported as separate courses in order to be consistent with NESA’s reporting practice“.

As can be seen on the graph, if a student wants the best chance of being a Distinguished Achiever or All Rounder, then they should study multiple languages, and creative and performing arts. 

These subjects award both an unreasonable proportion of Band 6s, and are deemed relatively easy by UAC (hence they are relatively poorly scaled). It begs the question – what is the purpose of an exam that awards 40 per cent or more of its students the top performance band? It also begs the question – why are so many resources being expended to run so many languages with such small candidatures when the exams aren’t fit for purpose. What do I mean? They do not differentiate within their cohorts and there is “a cost of assessing so many languages and also the problems of validity when the enrolments in many languages are so small“.

Why bother?

When it comes to the sciences, why bother studying Chemistry, Physics and Science Extension (or Economics for that matter)? They are so much more difficult, yet the reward of a Band 6, the metric by which to make the Honour Roll and how schools are measured, is so unlikely? 

This has been a status quo of many years and is naturally having a devastating effect on the sciences:

• Numbers in Chemistry have dropped to their lowest in a decade 
• Many schools can’t attract enough students for example Physics to run the course, or even steer them away so they don’t have to offer the subject (an awful, cynical strategy to deal with the specialist teacher shortage and low chances of Band 6) 
• Accordingly, many of the best science students are choosing not to study the sciences or are even being pressured away from them into other subjects
• Quite often, the Dux of a school is a different student to the All Rounder since the Dux studied e.g. Biology, ‘only’ achieving a high Band 5, negating their chance of being and All Rounder, but achieving the highest ATAR in the school, whereas the All Rounder chose subjects with easier access to Band 6 but was awarded a lower ATAR
• (There has also been a general decline in the number and diversity of Economics enrolments as highlighted by the RBA)

Of course, there are caveats: able students are capable in most subjects. But which subjects should they choose? Teenagers with self-doubt are opting out of subjects they fear they will ‘fail’ in – girls in STEM anyone?

An Easy Solution

The disparity in percentage Band 6 between the subjects is due to the current HSC being nominally a ‘standards-based’ assessment. I say nominally because the standards are different for every subject, and measured differently by respective subject experts. It is for this reason that UAC completely ignores HSC bands when calculating ATARs. 

The current standards-based model is 23 years old and consequently the system has been gamed over time.  It is no longer fit for purpose. Someone in NESA told me that the recent Curriculum Review, and the consequent Curriculum Reform, should really have been a Curriculum AND ASSESSMENT Review and Reform, to address just this issue. That was a missed opportunity, but there is still time, not least with the new syllabuses coming out in the next few years. 

Instead, I propose a norm-based approach for EVERY subject e.g.:

• Band 6 = the top 15% of students
• Band 5 = 35-15% 
• Band 4 = 60-35% 
• Band 3 = 80-60% 
• Band 2 = 95-80% 
• Band 1 = the bottom 5%

Perversely, while Band 1, a fail, usually only accounts for a few percent, it is currently reported at HSC as marks 0-49, thereby concertina-ing 95+% of students into marks 50-100. Scraping a Band 2 is reported in HSC as a mark of 50, a psychological pass, yet may have only been a raw exam mark of 30%. 

A pointless exercise

This is a pointless exercise to appease parents and employers, even though the students would have likely scored very low (≪50%) marks for two years. This arguably should be changed too, but is less important than fixing the bands.

Rather than the unfair yet non-random scatter gun that is currently Graph 1 (and has caused the editor all kinds of headaches), we would instead have a vertical line of dots since every subject would have an equal 15% of Band 6; UAC would merely differentiate the relative difficulty as they do currently i.e. only NESA needs to change here. 

This simple solution would make for fair comparisons between subjects and greater transparency. Students would have less to worry about when making subject selections. This solution would remove a lot of the gaming of the current system. It would also be a lot cheaper and quicker to run since the expensive judging process against standards would be removed. (Ironically, the current expensive judging process is sometimes disregarded if the statistics don’t match up with what the powers that be wish to be published – what a demoralising waste of money, time and expertise). Give it a couple of years, judging and marking by humans will be superfluous anyway, as cheaper, more accurate AI takes over the task.

Precise profiles

Also, the actual standards for every subject could become more meaningful and specific since we would know the precise profiles of, for example, what a Band 6 looks like in a subject, without meaningless generic terms like ‘extensive’. They could be generated accordingly with meaningful subject specific detail. Further, ‘standards packages’ of student samples of work by band, by subject would be more easily compiled. Only minor, less onerous monitoring over time would be required to ensure that standards were being maintained (rather than massaging the figures to maintain the ‘integrity’ of longitudinal data as occurs occasionally).

Ultimately, the Honour Roll would have more honour – every subject would have the same percentage of students in the Distinguished Achievers list; an All Rounder would be in the top 15% in 5+ subjects; and there would be a fair go for all of meeting the Premier and receiving awards, whether they chose a science or not.

Modified approaches

Perhaps modified approaches might need to be made for small candidature subjects such as languages. Then again, there are much bigger issues to consider with languages. Equally, in subjects where perfect marks are quite possible by many students e.g. Maths and Music, a more nuanced profile may be required. Then again, they could write more difficult exams.

Another improvement which could be adopted by NSW is to follow Victoria’s lead and actively report on ‘most improved’ schools. That removes the focus on the highest achieving (usually the highest socioeconomic) schools, and gives credit for value adding and improvement. (But NSW should ensure it maintains its greater level of exam security compared to Victoria).

There should be a fair go for all in this country. We constantly hear about the need for a STEM-skilled workforce, yet we undermine this constantly at high school level. A simple fix to the HSC would go a long way to encouraging the best young Australians of the viability to study – and subsequently work in – the high-need STEM fields, which are crucial to our economy and progress.

Postscript

Despite the title, this article is by no means suggesting we abandon the HSC in favour of, for example, the IB; we just need to fix the awarding of bands to be more meaningful and equitable across the subjects. Neither am I suggesting we abandon the HSC mark altogether to rely solely on the ATAR. However, I certainly feel that the ATAR should remain, despite some moves to abandon it, not least to keep the HSC in check. This is not yet another EduResearch Matters rant about NESA (see primary science and the arts); the standards-based HSC model was ahead of its time, but that was a LONG time ago. It is well overdue for an overhaul for the reasons stated. Solutions are proffered for consideration.

Thank you to Graham Wright for collating some of the data.

Dr Simon Crook is director of CrookED Science, a STEM education consultancy, and Honorary Associate at the School of Physics, University of Sydney. He works with primary and high school teachers and students around many aspects of science and STEM education, and assists the Sydney University Physics Education Research (SUPER) group with their work, including liaising with NESA regarding science syllabuses. His PhD research evaluated the impact of technology on student attainment in the sciences. Previously, Simon was a high school physics teacher.