Q. What does a standards-referenced approach mean?
A. The new Higher School Certificate (HSC) will use a standards-referenced approach to assessing and reporting student achievement.
This means that the achievements of students are assessed and reported against specified standards that are established for each course. In a standards referenced approach, students are recognised for what they know, understand and can do. The mark they receive will reflect the standard which the student has achieved in the course.
The current HSC uses a norm-referenced approach. In this approach, fixed percentages of students are placed into bands of marks according to a predetermined distribution. This occurs regardless of what students know, understand and can do, and fails to recognise the standard which the student has demonstrated in terms of achievement of course outcomes.

Q. What are the “standards”?
A. In the new Higher School Certificate these standards are:

• the knowledge, skills and understanding expected to be learned by students as a result of studying the course, referred to as the syllabus standards
• the levels of achievement of the knowledge, skills and understanding (reported in six bands), referred to as the performance standards.

Syllabus standards and performance standards are based on the aims, objectives, outcomes and content of a course. Together, they specify what is to be learned and how well it is to be achieved.

Q. How will the changes to the new HSC affect school policies and procedures?
A. The Board of Studies ACE Manual remains current for the year 2000. Schools should ensure that they are familiar with the HSC requirements concerning policy and procedures, as set down in this manual. School policies and procedures will need to reflect the Board’s requirements for the HSC internal assessment, as stated in the ACE Manual (check with the Board of Studies). Aspects of policy and procedure which must be developed and implemented by schools include:

• informing students in writing of the assessment requirements for each course before the commencement of the HSC course
• ensuring that students are given adequate written notice of the nature and timing of assessment tasks
• providing meaningful feedback on students’ performance in all assessment tasks
• maintaining records of marks awarded to each student for all assessment tasks
• addressing issues relating to illness, misadventure and malpractice in assessment tasks
• addressing issues relating to the late submission and noncompletion of assessment tasks
• advising students in writing if they are not meeting the assessment requirements in a course and indicating what is necessary to enable the students to satisfy the requirements
• informing students about their entitlements to school reviews and appeals to the Board
• conducting school reviews of assessments when requested by students
• ensuring that students are aware that they can collect their Rank Order Advice at the end of the external examinations at their school.

Schools will need to ensure that they understand the new mandatory assessment requirements of different courses by checking the relevant syllabuses. These changes to requirements need to be incorporated into school policy and procedures.
The Board still requires schools to develop an internal assessment program that:

• specifies the various assessment tasks and weightings allocated to each task
• provides a schedule of the tasks designed for the whole course.

Q. How will changes to the new HSC affect my assessment practices?
A. The white paper envisaged that changes to assessment practice would occur over several years, commencing in 2001.
Teachers should follow school policies and procedures and syllabus guidelines for assessment and reporting. They need to ensure that course requirements are followed in terms of the balance and weighting of components and types of tasks. What is important is that the strategies used to assess students are appropriate to the outcomes being assessed.
Teachers need to provide a mark for internal assessment tasks. These marks should be derived from the students’ achievement against selected criteria.
Appropriate feedback should be given to students to inform them about what they need to learn and do in order to improve their achievement in a subject.

Q. What are good assessment practices?
A. Teachers demonstrate good assessment practices when they:

• design and use assessment strategies which are directly linked to and reflect the course outcomes and the standards expected
• provide the opportunity for students to demonstrate their achievement of outcomes in a variety of types of task
• consider the type of assessment task being used, ensuring that it is appropriate to the outcomes being assessed
• inform the students of the assessment criteria on which the assessment task is to be judged, before the task is undertaken
• design for each task marking schemes which are aligned to the syllabus standards
• provide students with meaningful feedback about what they are able to do and what is needed to improve performance determine rankings and relative difference between students by level of achievement of the standards.

Q. Will the new HSC examination be different from the current examination?
A. HSC examination questions will be developed from the examination specifications. Teachers will need to check the examination specifications for each course they teach. Most courses have had changes made to their exam specifications as a result of the review process.
HSC examinations will now assess against standards. They will do this by using a variety of question types to enable students to demonstrate their level of achievement of course outcomes. Questions will be clearly worded and structured to indicate to students what is expected and will reflect a range and balance of course content and outcomes. Marking guidelines will be developed
which will align with the performance standards. Examinations will be marked using teachers’ professional judgement to determine the standard of students’ performance, and the marks awarded will reflect the standard.

Q. What are non-examination type tasks?
A. Some examples of non-examination type tasks include:

• laboratory reports
• computer simulations, multimedia presentations
• interviews, surveys, seminars
• debates, hypotheticals
• case study reports
• oral presentations
• community-based fieldwork
• research reports
• participant observation and analysis
• dramatic presentations
• interpretation of scenarios, statistics
• co-operative learning tasks
• investigation and analysis tasks
• audio-visual presentation or analysis
• practical performances to demonstrate theoretical understanding.

Q. What are performance scales and performance bands?
A. Students who successfully complete the HSC Course will have their performance reported against performance bands on a course report.
The course report includes a performance scale which describes five levels (bands) of achievement above a minimum standard expected. Each band on the performance scale (except band 1) includes descriptions that summarise the attainments typically demonstrated on that band.
Students who meet or exceed the minimum standard receive a mark of 50 or more. The mark awarded to a student will reflect the standard achieved in the course.
Performance scales can assist in internal assessment programs as they can be used to determine the wording of marking schemes and feedback to students.

Q. What do I need to understand about performance bands?
A. Teachers need to understand that the performance bands are used only to report students’ achievement at the end of the course. They provide a summative description of a student’s overall performance in a subject, based on internal assessment and the external examination.
Teachers need to recognise that the development of performance bands is an evolving process, in which the bands will continue to be refined to include information from performance in the new HSC courses and the outcomes assessed internally.
Support for teachers in developing an understanding of performance bands will include:

• State-wide workshops (LIG events) in November, which will specifically focus on assessment in the new HSC.
• New HSC Bulletins. Four HSC Bulletins are being developed to address issues concerning assessment and reporting in the HSC. The first bulletin is on Assessment—A Standards-Referenced Approach. Other issues that will be addressed include: the role of internal assessment; developing assessment tasks; reporting student achievement.
• Board of Studies support documents, including the Examination, Assessment and Reporting Supplement for each course.

Q. At the end of the HSC, what will I need to submit to the Board of Studies?
A. As in previous years, schools will provide the Board with a mark only.
These marks are the product of the internal assessment program and should indicate the rank order of the students and the relative differences between the students.
This mark will provide a summation of each student’s achievement, measured at points throughout the course.
Teachers will make informed judgements about the relative difference between students, based on their differing achievement of standards.

Q. What will happen to the internal assessment mark which I submit to the Board?
A. For each school course group, the school assessment marks submitted to the Board of Studies will be moderated on the basis of the group’s performance in the HSC examination. The approach to be used will be the same as at present, except that the raw examination marks will be used in the moderation process.
For each course, the moderated assessment and the examination mark will be averaged to provide a composite mark.
Experienced markers will follow a structured procedure, employing their professional judgement to determine what composite marks will correspond to the borderline between each performance band. This step provides a set of “mapping points” that enable students’ marks to be aligned with the performance scale.
For each student in a course, the moderated assessment mark and the examination mark are separately aligned with the performance scale.
The average of a student’s assessment mark and the examination mark, after alignment to the performance scale, is then reported as the student’s HSC mark.

Q. What will students receive in terms of an HSC?
A. Students will receive:

• The HSC testamur (if all requirements are met).
• A Record of Achievement which summarises results awarded in each course.
• A course report for each Board-developed course. This will show the moderated internal assessment mark, the external examination mark and the averaged HSC mark on a performance scale. This report also includes statements of a typical performance which a student would demonstrate in each band.
• VET credentials.