The educational standards in Australia have slowly eroded over time. Our education custodians have failed to reform a heavily biased assessment system that favours students with only a specific subset of skills.
How is the HSC setup?
The Higher School Certificate (HSC) employed by the NSW Department of Education is designed on the basis of ‘merit’. However, unlike the grading systems at the majority of tertiary institutions, the merit that the HSC rewards is collective, rather than individual.
Using what is known as a ‘ranking’ methodology, the current HSC is split into internal and external examinations. Students’ complete examinations set by their own teachers that are aggregately worth 50% of their total marks. Likewise, at the end of the Year 12 academic year, the students sit ‘high-stakes’ exams set by an independent party (same exam for everyone) that are symmetrically worth 50% of their grade.
Seems pretty simple, right? Students do exams at their school and complete external exams at the end of the year.
What do the ‘rankings’ mean for the HSC results?
Where do rankings come into this? In a perfect world, students would sit their internal and external exams and obtain a grade based on their marks in both schedules of assignments. With the addition of a ‘scaling’ system for the pre-determined ‘harder’ subjects such as Extension Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Languages and Extended English.
The drawback with a pure ‘grading’ system (like the ones used in universities) is that it does not provide a ‘safety net’ for students that fail to excel in some of the exams. Marks are fair and sometimes unforgiving but provide an unbiased picture of a student’s performance in a subject.
Therefore, the custodians of the current HSC system prefer the implementation of ‘collective competition’. This system encompasses providing ranks to students in their immediate cohort (school class) instead of grades. Thus, their grades for internal examinations/assignments are somewhat irrelevant, it is only their rank relative to their peers that is important. This eliminates the possibility of teachers inflating their students marks for internal exams.
However, whilst this is a brilliant system for internal examinations, the remaining element of the mechanism fails to capture the principle of fairness. Students obtain a ‘grade’ for their final external exam at the end of the HSC. Instead of getting their own mark for the exam, they are assigned the grade from their classmate’s exam that aligns with their internal rank. For example, if John ranked 3rd in his class for English for his internal exams but ranked 10th in the final exam. He would be given the mark of the student that achieved the rank of 3rd in the final exam. Hence, John has a safety net going into the exam, knowing he will assume the grade of the member of the class that ranks 3rd.
What happens to the internal grades? The inverse occurs. John’s internal mark (he ranked 3rd in internal exams) will be assigned to the classmate that ranked 3rd in the final HSC exam. Whilst John takes the grade of the student that ranked 10th in his class (he came 10th in the final exam). In other words, the mark a student will take for the internal exams is equivalent to their own rank in the final HSC exam.
The grades are also weighted through a ‘scaling’ system, wherein the difficulty of the subject is considered. Then, a final ‘rank is distributed to students based on the aggregate of their allocated marks (i.e add up their allocated marks from the internal and external assessments). This aggregate mark is ranked against every student in the HSC across all subjects. This final rank is known as an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank). This rank is standardised across all the states in Australia.
Why this system of grading?
Lost yet? Confusing, I know.
This system is employed for a few reasons:
- Prevent schools from over-inflating their internal marks for students.
- Foster competition between students in order to improve their performance and productivity throughout the academic year.
- Ensure ‘cohorts’ with a larger number of ‘excellent’ students to have larger opportunity to do well.
- Ensure the ‘final HSC exam’ is the most important examination, with an independent regulator that ensures fairness for students.
Who is disadvantaged?
The benefits seem pretty convincing. A focus on fairness and providing rewards to ‘collective cohorts’ that have a larger number of well-performing students. However, there are significant drawbacks that fosters students with large amounts of potential to be wasted:
- Students in ‘poor performing’ classes are disproportionately downgraded in marks due to the lower grades of their peers.
- The ATAR rank is an aggregate of all subjects, and thus doesn’t give students merit to focus on their passions and favourite subjects. Hence, this disavows specialisation and encourages students to be ‘jacks of all trades’, rather than experts in their own field.
- Provides ‘private schools’ that have significant funding, the ability to ‘cushion’ their under-performing students with ‘high-performing’ students in order to achieve a better overall rank.
- ‘High achievers’ in ‘poor performing’ cohorts are pressured into anti-social behaviour such selective assistance to students, misleading information to peers (competitors) and disruptive tendencies in their class in order to consolidate their higher rank.
- Students have limited sense of ‘ownership’ of their marks, rather an ownership of their ‘rank’. Thus, embedding counter-productive ideas that society is focused on ‘a system of ranks’ rather than individual merit. This is leads to a large number of development problems in student after the HSC.
- Students that select ‘harder’ subjects are destined to be scaled higher. Thus, students that choose ‘creative’ subjects such as drama, arts and social sciences to be left behind.
What is the solution?
The current system is clearly biased towards privatised schools and cohorts with a large number of ‘high achieving’ students. These cohorts consist of ‘all-rounders’ that do not specialise in fields of interest. This needs to be transformed into a mesosystem of independent ‘specialised’ areas of study that are autonomous in their grading.
In other words, ditch the overall rank at the end; and implement separate grades for each vocation or subject. Let the students excel at the things they want to excel in.
How do we achieve this?
Here is a sample blueprint:
- Replace the ATAR rank with a grading system that is based on marks achieved by each student. This would remove the purchasing power of privatised schools that garner a comparative advantage through the ‘cohort ranking’ system.
- Remove the ‘aggregate’ approach to the final grade. Each subject/field should provide their own grades to the students based on the most appropriate form of assignments such as work experience, practical placements, traditional examinations, or oral assessments.
- Universities adjust their admissions system to prominently consider the grades for each student by the relevant subject(s) for each course, rather than the overall HSC grade. This would represent a shift towards ‘specialisation’ instead of the ‘generalisation’ of the skill profile of students.
- ‘Decentralisation’ of examination content to provide students with a greater choice for material that they wish to be examined upon. This would involve the phasing out of standardised testing for the final HSC exam. The exams/assessments should be specific to the demographics of the region that is being examined. Rather than utilising an arbitrary examination structure that only benefits a select few schools that have stakeholders in the Board of Studies.
- Broader the definition of ‘intelligence’ to encompass creativity, arts, volunteering, social work and ‘trades’. This includes the numeration (through grades) of non-normative skills such as imagination, workmanship, and technological innovation. These skills gave incredible social value but are disproportionately under-valued in the tertiary education market. This should lead to the creation of a new university market for non-traditional courses that can up-skill students for long-term placement in fulfilling career paths.
The HSC is not broken. It needs an overhaul to get the best out of a changing demographic of students that want to be counted and contribute to society. We need to give them the chance to just that.
Daniel Dell’Armi
Live Your Story 