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14 December 2004
Daily Telegraph

The 6th Education Forum continues - The hurried HSC assessment system is under fire, writes UTS Associate Professor Geoff Riordan,

The NSW HSC was introduced in the 1960s as part of the broad restructure of secondary schooling in NSW known as the Wyndham scheme. It was originally envisaged as a university preparation program for the academic elite.

With the recent decline in jobs for 15 and 16-year-olds, the demand for a better-qualified workforce and changes to unemployment benefits requiring young people to be enrolled in formal courses of study if they wanted to receive government financial support, the number of students now sitting for the HSC has grown dramatically.

The new HSC course has accommodated the more varied educational needs of this new expanded cohort by offering a wider range of vocational subjects and electives. The "new" HSC also allows for more flexible study patterns and reports student learning against "standards". This means the HSC achievement is a description of "absolute" and not "relative" achievement.

But there are some problems. One of the changes that has been made to the HSC is the result of longstanding concerns about the high pressure of exams.

School assessment tasks now comprise 50per cent of the final HSC assessment. A student doing, say, five subjects in the HSC year may have up to four or five assignments per subject, all of which count, plus the HSC exam, which still counts.

That is, say 20 or more "high-stakes" assessment tasks to be covered in the 40 weeks maximum allowed for the HSC course.
Take from the 40 weeks, the first few weeks to get started in HSC work, several weeks for formal school exams and trial HSC exams, and students soon realise there is not much time to do the "assessables".

The HSC is stressful, and more so in recent years than it has been in the past. Dr Antony Kidman of the UTS Health Psychology Unit was recently reported as saying that 40per cent of HSC students believe it would affect them for the rest of their lives and that there was anecdotal evidence among HSC students of burnout, anxiety, sleeplessness and suicidal tendencies.

The NSW Commission for Children and Young People 2003 study of youth suicide found that 21.3per cent of youth suicides were school-related and that 6per cent of youth suicides might be attributable to events associated with the HSC.

Schools and teachers need to think very carefully about what they assess, how much they assess students, and how much these assessment tasks may be detracting from learning that is the sort of deep engagement that we know to be essential for quality teaching and learning.

The NSW Board of Studies is asking schools to consider setting no more then 15 assessment tasks for the HSC. Heeding this advice is likely to be a step in the right direction, as would restricting the high-demand, professional preparation university courses to graduate entry programs.

* Associate Professor Geoff Riordan is Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning, University of Technology Sydney, and a former secondary school teacher.

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