So here we are at the end of a lacklustre year where I decided that trying to understand the marking system of the HSC is like trying to understand some alien life force that bares no resemblance to anything we regard as real on this earth.
Ok, Lacklustre maybe over stating things, as family life is always busy and makes for a hectic ride at times. We were all healthy and achieved well, but Steve's demotion did tend to put a dampener on the year. Particularly when he was replaced in his position of ten years by a boss who is, shall we say, a little green, and Steve is widely expected to help out in the spirit of being a team player. As can well be imagined, he spends most of his time bemoaning this or that and generally feeling decidedly uncharitable in the 'still do most of your old job, just not get paid for it' stakes.
Sarah was our guinea pig in the coveted HSC stakes, and we placed all our money on her not only getting a place but blitzing the field. However an early mishap at the trials brought about by an absent teacher and a culpable lack of professionalism from said teacher to:
1. tell her she had plateaued in her abilities, and to
2. neglect to provide any feedback to students sitting their trials so that they may perform their best.
This meant that Sarah bombed in her Trial English paper and on the back of being told the teacher felt she had plateaued while the rest of the class where improving, all but destroyed all her confidence in herself and took the mojo out of her HSC prep. A particularly cruel thing for a professional to do, particularly to possibly the best and brightest student she will ever have the fortune to teach in her career.
I maybe biased, I am her loving mother. But come on, her entire school career has led me to this conclusion, I am not facing the world through distorted rose coloured glasses.
Every year she finished top of her class taking out the academic achievement award through Primary school. For years 5 and 6 she attended an Opportunity Class where she was in a class of children with similarly high academic abilities. None-the-less she came out top and was awarded DUX at the end of year 6.
Move onto High school and her stellar career continued. Unlike most clever students, instead of finishing first in one or two subjects she would finish first in all but one or two subjects, often being the only person to elicit spontaneous school wide applause during the obligatory 'hold your applause to the end' instruction. She showed promise to all who knew her, teachers, parents, students and community people alike, and she held this esteem in good grace and with amazing humility.
So no, I am not deluded. This girl has something special and her star is yet to finish rising. So why, at the crux of her school career, the point where she is about to dive into the most defining part does a teacher so categorically set about to destroy her confidence and belief in herself? This girl who was always so positive and encouraging to her classmates and whose personal motto is "Only Anything is Possible". She's a doer, involved in everything, never afraid to have a go, enjoys a challenge and would bend over backwards to learn and understand new concepts. This girl has most definitely not peaked, nor plateaued.
This whole episode has left me wondering, is the HSC in its present format fair? A quick internet search reveals,
apart from this 2013 article, that most commentators do indeed believe it is fair. However I do notice that the vocal commentators do tend to be representatives from the selective or private schools in predominately metropolitan areas. Nothing is heard from the smaller disadvantaged rural school. Why? Could it be that a system, that to me, appears to favour larger schools with a concentration of the 'more able students' versus smaller schools who also may have a small concentration of more able students but are also more likely to have a corresponding concentration of less able students that must then factor into any moderation.
Let me explain, because two factors I believe fed into the apparent unfairness of Sarah's final results. I should explain that she did do very well and we are pleased with and proud of her 85.3 ATAR score. It enables her to get into the Uni subject that she desires, so a higher mark was not necessary. As Sarah said, I am happy to let the 90's go to the people who needed those marks to get into their courses. Ever gracious. For me I want to understand the system because I believed she would, based on her standing in relation to the rest of her class in her entire school career, achieve over 90, possibly even high 90's. Sarah is our first, first hand experience of the NSW HSC. Steve and I did our year 12 certificate in the ACT where we had 100% of our mark based on continuous assessment. We knew all along how we were going and could adjust subject choice term by term as we progressed in order to tweek our final outcome based on our demonstrated strengths and weaknesses.
Firstly, with the NSW HSC it appears that it is vitally important who comes first in the assessment component of the course. First place getter has the honour of applying the highest HSC exam score to their own assessment mark...........What? It does my head in, but apparently this is some convoluted way of moderating the schools against each other, and a better explanation about how this works can probably be found elsewhere on the web. But to me it seems that you are not being assessed solely on you and how you individually do, you are tied to your cohort in a quite twisted way.
Let's run a little scenario: A group of higher achieving students, lets say three or four in the class are performing well above their peers. As the person who comes first in the course is determined by the teacher through their assessments it is feasible that a favoured student could be deliberately elevated to first position. Then they are guaranteed the best test score to be applied to their assessment mark regardless of whether they earned it. Second, third and fourth, even if they decided to study their hardest and try and make up for their lower assessment mark will have to take the lower test score as their assessment mark. Student A is liked and promoted by the teacher to first in class and scores 90. Students B,C and D also doing very well but only score 88,85 and 84 respectively. Come HSC test time, Student A already knows he is set and decides to party instead of study particularly hard. Students B,C and D are really keen to do their best and study extremely hard to try and make up ground. At the test Student A scores 70, Student B scores 98, Student C scores 90 and student D scores 87. The assessment marks get moderated and Student A walks away with top mark even though he only scored top for 50% of the course.
Secondly, lets look at the socio economic position of the school. A small regional or rural school with a wide spread of abilities versus a large metropolitan school with a lesser spread of abilities. At our school, from the example above, take a situation where you have not one outlier, but three or four. In a small cohort of say 30 pupils, the statistical model will allow for one outlier, but not four, so the three that didn't rank first will be dragged down by their cohort. For the outliers at the bottom, apart from the very last position, this system would pull the remaining outliers back up. So this is a good look for disadvantaged schools as it doesn't make their scores look quite so bad, but by doing this they sacrifice the top outliers.
If those same top outliers were in a much larger school, say of 200 pupils, the statistical spread would allow for them to be much closer to the top and their actual score. With (probably) less likelihood of the bottom outliers being quite as low as the small rural school, when the moderation process occurs the ones who didn't finish first would not be dragged as low, infact there would be very little adjustment to their raw score. Imagine the difference between stretching a piece of elastic of 30cm length over a distance of 70cm, versus concentinaing a 200cm piece over a distance of 40cm. If each cm mark represents a student and the distance stretched or concertinaed is the range of HSC scores. Obviously small disadvantaged and rural schools will struggle with this system. Yet their hands are tied to speak out about this because to admit you are disadvantaged by attending these schools for HSC is to further chase away the more able students and further hamper your ability to ever score well as a school.
Added to this situation is the the notion that certain schools like to be seen as marking hard so that when their pupils do better than expected in the HSC exam, they can gain a benefit in being moderated up. In playing this game and trying to play the system, students and the overall integrity of the system are compromised. A student can end up with the triple whammy of, being deliberately marked hard in the assessment component, failing to make first place in the cohort, yet still very bright in the scheme of things, and have the remaining cohort of a relatively small number under perform and drag down her weighting.
Whilst trying to devise a convoluted system that is supposedly fair to everyone it turns out to be just another system open to manipulation and designed to make certain sectors look good. That is raise the bottom cohort of disadvantaged schools as that is politically expedient and maintain the status quo of the better performing larger schools of mainly middle and upper class backgrounds. What makes the system even worse is that IT IS NOT TRANSPARENT.
Surely any assessment system must have at its core transparency. Students never ever find out what their exam marks were. In English they will never know if they excelled or bombed in creative writing, was it the essay writing that gave them the bulk of their score or the short answer. In art was the major work a defining factor or was it the essay in their final mark. How can a person get to the end of their thirteen years of schooling, and be assessed in the biggest and most comprehensive exam of their life, and not find out in what areas they excelled and what areas they did less well? In short, they finish school not truly knowing where their strengths lie. Now that's crazy, because it is their comparison with the rest of the students across the state, not just those in their school class cohort that will give them a true indication of how well they really did.
So why do I care? The HSC is over and it's greater relevance on later life is practically zip once you make it into Uni. Even now there are many paths into Uni so the ATAR mark, which is correlated from the HSC score is meaning less and less. Well as I wrote earlier, Sarah is our guinea pig in a system that prior to this we have had very little experience of. Next up, starting year 11 next year is Evan, and he wants to score as highly as possible - well that's the point isn't it? So how do we learn from Sarah's experience? I certainly don't want to face a situation where he gets his confidence shattered, like Sarah had hers, but more importantly I want to understand how he can achieve true to his abilities and not be unduly penalised by attending that same small regional or rural school that Sarah did.
So yeah a relatively lacklustre year all things considered, but we're still here kicking and fighting, and of course, all things can only be up from here for 2015....can't they. But then again we still have that Federal mob in power and with their insistence on dismantling the family tax benefit system, household finances are going to stretch even tighter. A child at Uni, a pay cut and a winding back of benefits, I guess the belt is going to get tighter so that we become lifters instead of leaners, or maybe we'll just become even leaner.
For now let's say farewell to 2014 with a bang and a smile. Another year over, Christmas round the corner and a fabulous family hanging out and spending time together, when all is said and done, at the end of the day, it doesn't actually get much better than that.
Ellie got into the swing of the adventure by dressing up as Wonder Woman, wearing a tiara and bringing along a star topped wand and a length of rope. This supposed 20-30 minute walk from Sealy Road to Korora Lookout was going to take a bit longer than that for us. 
Moving at Ellie pace, we left the car park after reading the interpretive sign and climbed down the slate steps to a service road. The walk is fairly easy going as it is essentially along a service road that has been built to maintain a radio tower. We will get to the radio tower shortly, but first we had to let all of the other walkers past as we had some serious exploring to do.
The walk is made more interesting by the addition of some artistic sculptures created by a local indigenous artist. There are no interpretive signs accompanying the art, nor a name to let us know who created the pieces. But, none the less they are very good, particularly the first one. It is a vertical piece of wood, carved into wavy patterns, with rusty iron and a lizard. Because this walk is all about telling the aboriginal dreaming story about the black goanna
The first half of the walk is as much a wander through a natural art gallery as it is a nature walk with tantalising glimpses of sparkling blue ocean. Just past the half way point we come across the radio tower. Now this edifice should be an ugly blight on an otherwise beautiful walk. But a fence and the associated buildings have been painted in stunning art work. The paintings tell some of the story of the black goanna....Ah yes, that WAS what this walk was meant to be all about. The painting is bright, colourful and very beautiful.
