Raw Marks, Raw Wounds
A couple of years ago I wrote two articles (2021, 2022) regarding the flaw of measuring systems, schools, teachers and students by their number of Band 6s, since Band 6s are not created equally between subjects. I think it is incumbent upon us as school leaders to ensure that all within our communities, including colleague leaders, are familiar with the arguments. As I describe below, not only is comparing numbers of Band 6s completely flawed, it is also detrimental to students making informed choices when choosing subjects for Year 11, or dropping units from Year 11 to Year 12, and can be devastating to student and teacher self-efficacy and well-being.
The current HSC standards-based assessment model, launched in 2001, was never designed for subjects to be compared with each other. This was stated at its inception, and seems to be restated annually; usually in a Sydney Morning Herald article including quotes from Professor Jim Tognolini (one of the original architects of the HSC), the Science Teachers’ Association NSW, and myself. But we keep on making these comparisons and tallies: in school ranking tables, Honour Rolls (both somewhat ironically published in the SMH also), school marketing and internal school performance reviews.
UAC recognises the variance in standards, rigour and band distribution across different subjects; that is why they scale subjects accordingly to determine a student’s ATAR. The most extreme example I have encountered in my work supporting Science teachers was in 2020: a Band 1 (a high fail, talk about an oxymoron!) in Physics could rank higher than a Band 4 in Visual Arts. Yet science teachers, HoDs and school Principals are pilloried by higher powers if the number of Band 6s in the sciences are less than in other subjects, even though we (should) know it’s comparing apples with oranges.
Thus to my main argument in this short piece. As a result of diminished student (and teacher) self-efficacy and well-being due to unfair flawed comparisons between subjects, too many of the best science students are choosing not to study a science in Stage 6 altogether or to drop a science as they progress from Year 11 to Year 12. The technical reason for this is misunderstanding ‘raw marks’. When a student receives their marks from a school-based written exam e.g. Year 11 exams, or a topic test (a work around for the NESA restrictions on written exam assessments), they misunderstand the marks at face value. HSC marks and bands incorrectly imply a 90 is a Band 6 and a 50 is a Band 2. Accordingly, many science students are devastated if they get a test/exam mark of 49% or 78%. They mistakenly think they have failed (Band 1) or ‘only’ attained Band 4 respectively. They do not realise that NESA ‘moderate’ up such raw exam marks to reported HSC Exam marks. In fact, on average, a raw exam result of 49% in the sciences might scrape a Band 4; a raw exam mark of 78% usually aligns with a high Band 5, close to a Band 6!
Such translations are only shared with students in schools that know such correlations and allow such communication. Frustratingly, I have been formally gagged from teaching teachers how to calculate raw exam percentages using HSC RAP data, but some experienced teachers do know how to do this. I would argue that greater transparency about raw marks would mean students were better informed of the true trajectory of their progress and thus they would have better self-efficacy and make better informed decisions regarding which subjects to take and which units to drop in Stage 6. This would likely mean that schools wouldn’t lose their best students from the sciences due to misunderstandings or obsessions with Band 6s and making the Honour Roll, and results would actually go up; the accountability we are all exposed to.
Dr Simon Crook
ACEL NSW Branch Executive Member,
Director, CrookED Science,
Honorary Associate, School of Physics, The University of Sydney