Teachers & Students - Is the AST past it?

When I was in College circa 1995 we had the TER (tertiary Entrance Rank).

My mother encouraged me to go for it (just in case I wanted to go to uni pfft) and my school discouraged it due to my straight C marks.

needless to say I only scored 22.45 out of 100 (The hallmark of my tertiary education!!) – Im now on plus 55k a year working for “The Man”…. make of that 22.45 what you will

Bugger me. Thanks for the advice. It kinda makes sense, though: how one earth would I have time to take an interest in my children when I have to whinge and bitch and moan all day (about living in the Australian city with the best roads, nicest green areas and highest average income)…

no no no VY, teachers are responsible for raising our children these days not us get with the programme.

J Dawg, the HSC is not one massive set of exams, at least it wasn’t when I did it. You have the massive set of exams at end of year 9, end of year 10 (for the SC), end of year 11, mid year 12, 3rd quarter year 12 and end year 12. On top of this you have in class examinations. The point I was making was that having to undergo this level of examination ensures that students who actually give a crap get substantial experience in exam technique.

As for GnT’s comment above, I don’t think modern education prepares anyone particularly well for life: that’s what parents are supposed to do.

I think with the ACT system you actually learn how to write essays.

I learnt to do them in Yr 9 – with a strategy called ‘bundling’.

I think it’s more the quality of the teacher/class and also the student’s commitment to their educaiton, prior to Uni, than the actually HSC/Non-HSC debate.

This discussion seems to have become “Which system prepares students better for uni”. How about “Which system prepares students better for life”? Or “Which system of obtaining a score more acurately reflects how much the student has learnt (as in deep understanding) rather than how much they can recall and regurgitate”?

What some people appear not to realise is that just because students don’t do the HSC it doesn’t mean they don’t do exams.

Instead of one massive set of exams (HSC), here in the ACT students have four sets of exams with equal importance. Plus the AST, which is a set of exams (although different to subject exams).
In regards to stress, there are people who always stress over exams, no matter how small. The difference is instead of those people stressing once (over HSC), they stress 5 times (4 semesters + AST).

I think it depends on what you are studying. For example, in engineering your own opinion doesn’t typically carry much weight. The essay writing is an interesting one, too. When I was in year 9 (a while ago now) we had a teacher straight out of uni who made it her mission to teach us to write essays – one each week for most of the year. For students who don’t get that, essay writing can indeed be difficult. That said, I think I wrote about 2 essays in my entire engineering degree!

There’s always going to be advantages and disadvantages to each approach. I still think the exam technique and practice of the HSC was incredibly helpful, but maybe that’s just me.

As for Woody’s question, well who can tell? Depends on how you define ‘better’. I’d suggest it’s not really possible to compare scores across different courses to get any meaningful result, and many courses may not have anough NSW students to get meaningful comparisons. I suspect, though, that if you can survive the HSC (yep, it’s stressful!), that you can survive most of what uni dishes out.

from someone that went through the ACT system recently and is now enjoying the high life at UC.
I think with the ACT system you actually learn how to write essays, I’ve noticed that a lot of the non-ACT students don’t know how to write an essay properly, and so we are have had lectures about simple essay writing. By the time you start uni, you should really have that down pat.

In term’s of the big HSC style exam, I don’t think there is any advantage. In any case where I’ve studied hard for a one off exam, I have forgotten most of it by the next week. In most cases I don’t think it is an efficient way to learn, instead of you forming your own opinion, it is about remembering exact details and what not.

I agree that the AST isn’t perfect, and I was under the impression that they were changing the way it was structured so that it was only your result that influenced your mark (compared to the result of the school).

and with what VYBerlina said, I would have thought if you were studying engineering you would know that it wouldn’t be easy. And you would have had to complete some pretty hard maths courses at school, which in my case, had pretty big exams at the end.

I would suggest that the ACT does not prepare people adequately

Do ACT students do better, no better or worse or worse than their interstate counterparts at university?

Oh, and as was pointed out above, continous assessment is 50% of the HSC.

life is full of needless stresses….

Sepi – I agree that unsupervised attendance is probably much better for those who have come through the ACT system, but I was referring to results rather than intentions. And ultimately, results are what count. Standard generalisation disclaimers apply, of course.

Years ago the ACT govt had research which showed that ACT students did just as well at Uni as anyone else – and coped better in terms of the unsupervised attendance. Students from strict private schools in fact performed the worst in their first term of university as the unstructured nature was so foreign to them.

It seems that anyone who wwent thru HSC wants to see others suffer thru it just becuase they did.

Of course life has stresses, but what is the point of needless ones like HSC, if the same result can be achieved with continuous assessment.

Execution technique, that is (I just lost 5%).

Having done the HSC followed by 2 fairly tough degrees (one full time, the other part time while working full time), I would suggest that the ACT does not prepare people adequately for the exams universities set in the more challenging courses. If you don’t have substantial experience with 3 hour exams when you start first year, you are going to have real trouble with engineering, for example. Placing students under pressure is a deliberate strategy in some uni courses to weed out those who don’t really want to be there (or shouldn’t have made it in). Based on my experience, those students who did ACT yr 12 had to play a lot of catch up in the area of exam preparation and exuction technique. It’s worth remembering too that the HSC is not a single exam type assessment, but a result that combines 50/50 with your continuous assessment during years 11 and 12.

I’ve put my position in support of the current continuous assessment system here several times before. In regards to the NowUC article, the problem with a system like that proposed is that with no scaling test equivalent, it encourages schools to mark the 75% (or 50%, or whatever) coursework component easier than other schools, so that their students get higher marks.

The scaling test isn’t perfect, but it’s hard to think of a better alternative. By the way, I don’t think the scenario given by AG can skew the results much as the “dummies” would have had lower coursework marks too – so excluding them from the AST would also bring up the schools coursework marks which means that they wouldn’t get a scaling advantage.

Yes sepi, thats right we don’t want to ‘pressure’ these poor year 12 students. Heaven forbid they have to learn to deal with pressure on the precipice of adulthood that will continue for the rest of their life…

No school system is perfect but in life there will always be ‘crunch times’ and the external exams of the HSC is merely one of many.

The 50/50 internal/external style assessment as used in NSW is a much better preparation for university study. There are very few courses (at least at the ANU) that don’t have large weighting end of course exams. At least the external exams at the end of the HSC are taken seriously, no one turned up to them drunk like I’ve heard happening at some ACT schools for the AST.

Continuous assessment is definitely the way to go.

What benefit is there is putting so much pressure on teens in year 12 with HSC? ACT teens don’t have to suffer through it, and still do well at Uni, as well as actually enjoying year 11 and 12.

The ACT has fantastic retention rates in year 11 and 12, and offers good subjects for those not going to uni as well.

The ACT system is good.

The problem is that some schools discourage any “dummies” from attempting to get a UAI – therefore raising it’s overall AST ranking. Instead of assisting these students to work hard and gain a reasonable score – they discard them so that they don’t bring the school’s mark down.

Having said that – continous assessment is the way to go – just because out parents had final exams doesn’t mean that they are the right way to go.

I think the AST system works well. Sure it has flaws, but so does every equivalent system.

With that extract posted, I must say I disagree. The schools GA is important because the AST is used to standardise. A students UAI is based upon their scores in schoolwork. Every school has different students, hence the standard of work is different. Getting a course score of 95 at School A might mean that you get a course score of 80 at School B. This is because School B has a higher standard of students for that particular course. Now, that student might go to school B, and their UAI needs to reflect the fact that they are attending a school with brighter students. Hence the AST recognises that School B has a high standard, and if the student does well in the AST, then it will compensate for their lower school marks, and their UAI will be higher.

So the system is complicated but it works.