The ‘value’ of the Higher School Certificate

As we move toward the end of the year, the current cohort of year 12 students will start to study, stress and fret about the upcoming final examinations in each state and territory (HSC, QCE, VCE, WACE, SACE and NTCET) – and the determinant ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank). I have a long-held belief that these exams are superfluous. They are neither a culmination of school learning, nor a quality indicator of the success one has had throughout their schooling career. Instead, they measure how well one has studied for and learned the content of year 12 and the subjects a particular student chose to study in their final years of schooling. While there is nothing wrong with this – most school systems have exams, what I find peculiar is the emphasis that is put on these exams… and the cost! This week’s post will look at the evidence base for these exams, what the ATAR really means, and why NSW is willing to fork out $100,000,000 for what has essentially become a university entry exam.

I would love to get into the preposterous nature of asking 16yr-old year ten students to choose their year 11 and 12 subjects, which ultimately have a determining factor on their ATAR and eventual university course and career path, but I’ll save that rant for another time. Today’s rant is really about the cost of the HSC examination in NSW and why the state is willing to pay $100m for an exam. Before I get into this seemingly wasteful spending, it is important to understand what the HSC is and why it is important enough to attract $100m in spending. The Higher School Certificate (HSC) denoted the year 12 certification that was gained by students who chose to progress past the School Certificate Exam, which was, until 2012, the minimum compulsory requirement for schooling in NSW. It has since been replaced by the RoSA, which is simply a Record of School Achievement, which is provided to students who leave school after year 10, if they are engaged in full-time employment or study (such as a trade school), or if they leave school at the minimum leaving age of 17. Students who progress to year 12 and complete the requirements – essentially submit all assessments and sit the HSC exam for each of their subjects, received a Higher School Certificate. That’s right, everyone received an HSC, there was no minimum requirement or standard, you just had to complete the courses.

This changed slightly in 2020, when a minimum requirement in literacy and numeracy was enforced for the HSC. Students now need to meet minimum literacy and numeracy requirements to be eligible for an HSC. These are set at the Australian Core Skills Framework Level 3, which indicates “minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy.” In the first iteration of the implementation of the minimum standards, students were able to attain the standard in their Year 9 NAPLAN (National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy) by achieving a Band 8 out of possible 10, which indicated students were above the national minimum standard (Band 6). This is all a digression from the main point, but is aiming to illustrate that the HSC has little to no real meaning beyond assessing a student’s year 12 work. It has just recently set a minimum standard for literacy and numeracy, roughly equivalent to slightly higher than the minimum national standard expected in Year 9. In regards to the subjects students actually choose, they simply have to attempt every assessment and sit their examination and they attain their Higher School Certificate. There is no minimum standard to achieve in the subjects, so what does it mean to receive an HSC… Nothing!

This brings us to the ever-important Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR), that dreaded number that determines, somewhat, the university course you can enter. ATAR is administered through the University Admissions Centre (UAC). So, once you complete your HSC and that ‘gold standard’ $100m process takes place, you are issued your ATAR by UAC. UAC is also where you would apply to most universities, as opposed to applying direct to universities; therefore, UAC has a vested interest in issuing ATAR and having that rank valued by students and universities who pay UAC for their services. The ATAR is often misunderstood, so here is a brief rundown. ATAR is a ranking, not a score, and it measures one’s achievement against all others in their age group. This is the interesting part: it doesn’t measure you against all others who took the same subjects as you in the HSC or even those who took different subjects, instead it ranks you against everyone your age. What this means is that when you get your ranking, for example an ATAR of 80.00, you are in the top 20% of all people in your age group, whether or not they actually completed school or took the HSC.  In other words, your rank is probably considerably lower, if compared only against other students who took the HSC.

So, once you have your ATAR you can apply for courses, through UAC, that have an ATAR course entry requirement at or below your rank. Every university sets its own ATAR for different courses. If you want to study medicine at the University of Sydney you need a 99.95; if you want to study economics at Australia National University, you’ll need a minimum of 80.00; and, if you want to study Arts at Australia Catholic University, you’ll need a 59. An important note is that all of these are indicative, which means they’re variable. There are adjustment factors that can be applied to a student’s ATAR in the form of bonus points and these vary from university to university and course to course. That, in a nutshell, is ATAR, but how does ATAR work and why is that score important?

Now that we have a good understanding of what the ATAR is, we really need to get into why does NSW spend $100m on an HSC that leads to an ATAR.  According to the UAC, the ATAR is, “the best available predictor of university success, as measured by students’ first-year grade-point-average (GPA). The higher the ATAR, the higher the student’s first-year GPA is likely to be.” This was from research conducted by… UAC. That’s like Phillip Morris conducting research to tell us that cigarettes are good for you, isn’t it?  UAC has a vested interest in making sure that ATAR is valued, because that’s what they do and how they make money – they provide the ATAR. What does a high first-year GPA have to do with success at university over the course of a three- or four-year degree? For that, we have to dig into the research. UAC, in the same paper above, state that their research is consistent with research conducted by the Grattan institute. So, let’s look at that research. 

The Grattan Institute’s research, which was cited by UAC as justification for the use of ATAR, has very little to do with GPA or success, from the lens of ATAR. The Grattan institute research suggests that students with a high ATAR have good prospects of completing university, it does not make generalisations about the predictive ability of ATAR in anything other than completion; note, no link to GPA. In other words, the research says that students with an ATAR below 60 have a 40% chance of not finishing, but students with a 90 ATAR or better only have a 20% chance of not finishing. If the HSC ‘gold standard’ is really about the success of students, which then culminates in an ATAR that may have predictive power, but that predictive power doesn’t tell us much about success, then it would seem to me, that that’s $100m poorly spent.

What I mean is that of course we would expect that students with better high school results would have a better chance of success at university, that’s just common sense, isn’t it?  The fact that 20% of students with ATAR over 90 don’t complete university should tell us that ATAR isn’t an indication of success, but that it could have an adverse effect. One would expect that students with an ATAR over 90 would have a at least a 90-95% completion rate of university, right? So, why is it only 80%?  One reason could be that students with high ATAR feel like they should go into courses that require high ATAR. If you get a 99.95, the expectation is you go into Medicine (99.95), Law (99), or Architecture (95).  Does the student who scores a 99, really apply to study Philosophy at ACU, with a required ATAR of 59, even if this is where their interest lies?  I think the 20% non-completion rate of students who score over 90, implies they do not.

The Grattan Report also suggests that it is market forces and not ATAR that ultimately determine what students get into what courses. And if that is the case, then again, what purpose does ATAR play? Specifically, the Grattan Report says: “the standards and prospects for success are irrelevant to the ATARs required for admission… ATAR is used as a fair and efficient way of allocating scarce student places, not to protect prospective students from a poor choice.”  Also in the Grattan Report, two studies are cited that indicate that ATAR under-predicts their academic performance (Li & Dockery, 2014; Messinis & Sheehan, 2015). So if ATAR doesn’t particularly have predictive power of success and its predictive power of completion only tells us the best 10% of students have a 20% better chance of completion than the worst 10% – does the rank really have any value?

So, now I want to return to the $100m question: Is $100m justified for the HSC? The HSC is not a national exam, it is a standardised state-based exam that tells us how well a student has done in year 12, that’s it! It then leads to an ATAR, which tells us what course a student can get into, sort of. The sort of is because universities can then add bonus points to the ATAR if required. In other words, a university might set an ATAR of 80 for 400 students to enter into Primary Education, but then only get 370 that apply for that course with an ATAR of 80+ – they can then add points to those who score lower to fill the available places or just simply lower the ATAR required. It is not a standard practice. It’s not even standard within each university year to year, it’s constantly changing. Then we get fed a story about the predictive power of ATAR, but do we really need a ranking to tell us that students with higher academic success in high school have a better chance of finishing university? Is that worth the $100m spent on the HSC? 

My problem isn’t necessarily with the HSC or ATAR, my issue is that the state is paying for the HSC, which is essentially a university entry exam and one that has little predictive power regarding success. NSW is paying $100m so that a university can allocate its places within courses without having to do much of anything. What if NSW stopped spending $100m on the HSC? What if, as was recommended in the most recent curriculum review, they stopped calculating and reporting ATAR? What if universities were ultimately responsible for assessing the work of a student beyond their final examination marks in year 12 to determine suitability for their courses?  $100 million is a lot of money, especially when looked at as yearly expenditure.  One would think that if the state had an extra $500 million to spend in education over the next 5 years, they could come up with programs that could really improve the education outcomes for those students most in need, which could possibly increase the proportion of students progressing to year 12 or moving into pathways that offer gainful employment, rather than spending that money on a series of assessments that are no longer relevant.