WITH the 2019 Higher School Certificate exams under way and running until Monday, November 11, some 75,000 NSW students are negotiating the long-awaited apex of their lives at school.
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For the students, the HSC is both a rite of passage and - for many - a stressful time they may wish they could do without.
For the adults in their lives, the subjects studied in the modern HSC - and the multiplicity of avenues for further education available to school leavers - may seem bewildering in comparison with with the relative simplicity of earlier decades.
Across Australia, about 200,000 final year students will be sitting their exams. Despite the nation's historically state-based education systems, substantial progress has been made in recent years to create a national Year 12 certificate as part of moves to build a national education curriculum. Indeed, outside of NSW and the ACT, the Year 12 exam is now known as a certificate of education: the Victorian Certificate of Education, the Tasmanian Certificate of Education, and so on.
Such jurisdictional differences were the major reason the ATAR or Australian Tertiary Admission Rank was introduced in 2009 to replace the handful of state-based university admission scales that operated until then.
Our education system should always change to keep pace with the society it is training young people to take part in. For the students, however, the focus will naturally be on the here-and-now, rather than the HSC their siblings or parents remember.
In a world where concerns about mental health and stress and resilience are commonplace conversations, the competitive side of Year 12 exams is being increasingly downplayed. Anyone opening the home web page of the South Australian Certificate of Education is immediately drawn to this message, in bold orange type, saying: "The SACE is not a competition. It's an individual journey where success can look different for every student".
While the second sentence is true, examinations, like life itself, are competitive environments. No one offered two HSC results is going to take the lower one. And happily, most students will achieve a score in line with their expectations. With this in mind, the Herald congratulates the classes of 2019, and wishes them all the best in their exams, and their future endeavours.
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