7.1 Schools provide not only instruction for students, but also make judgments of the students' responses to that instruction in tenns of 'their academic performance, their willingness to learn, their cooperativeness and so on. Records of such judgments, by individual teachers or schools or by educational authorities, serve as credentials with which students seek access to further education or employment.
7.2 At the point of transition from secondary to tertiary education there have long been tensions. Some teachers in tertiary institutions claim that students entering from secondary education are not adequately prepared and that the certificates of their educational achievements do not provide a sufficient guarantee of quality. Teachers in secondary schools, on the other hand, claim that the academic requirements of higher education and in particular the requirements of the credential used to select students, exert an unreasonable influence on the secondary school curriculum. As participation rates in upper secondary education have grown much faster in recent years than those in higher education, the problems have worsened. A smaller proportion of students who remain to the final years of secondary education proceeds to higher education (see Table 3.7), yet the pressures for success are such that the great majority of all students in those years enrols in subjects which are clearly designed to prepare students for higher education.
7.3 There are also tensions between secondary schools and employers over the nature and use of the credentials with which students leave schools and seek employment.
Se('ondary !ea('hers (,0!!!plai!1 rhflt emp!oyer.<;: too oftp,n llse information designed as a hasis for selection of students for higher education, thus reinforcing the status of that information while ignoring other potentially more useful material. Employers, on the other hand, are inclined to respond that the other forms of information are more difficult to understand and much more difficult to use in making comparisons among applicants.
7.4 The nature of the credentials issued is in need of review to ensure that students obtain adequate and useful statements of their achievements in school. The Curriculum Development Centre has sponsored such a review which will be published shortly to stimulate public discussion (I). In this chapter the Committee reviews the current situation and considers various options for changing it in the light of the need to improve the relationship between secondary education and further education and employment.
CURRENT METHODS OF CREDENTIALLING
Reports to Parents
7.5 Although schools' reports to parents are not public documents they provide the only regular record of students' progress through primary and secondary education.
Parents' interpretations of the reports have traditionally been guided by the use of a form of reporting which indicates how their child's performance compares with those of others in the class or school. This type of reporting is said to be norm referenced because it 90
indicates a student's standing with respect to some norm or average. Comparisons can be made within a group taught by a single teacher or within larger groups. Common tests may be used to compare all students in a school taking the same subject. External examinations take the full group of students sitting the examination as the comparison group and allow comparisons across schools.
7.6 Nonn referenced assessment has been criticised for concentrating on differences among students in their achievements without consideration of the actual levels of those achievements. Students classified in the bottom or, at best, below average group may be judged to be performing poorly no matter how good their actual performance in relation to their potential. Those ranked at the top may be judged to be performing well no matter how poor their actual performance is. Many teachers use norm referenced marking techniques to stimulate and improve students' work but these techniques are most likely to be effective for the top performers. For others, such comparative assessment can create failure where perhaps it need not exist.
7.7 An alternative to comparing students' perfonnances competitively with one another is to compare them with defined criteria for performance. The assessments can then be said to be criterion referenced. The quality of such measures of achievement depends heavily on the appropriateness of the criteria themselves. In some cases, the criteria involve almost perfect mastery of what is learned - as is demanded, for example, in a driving licence test. The choice of critcrion levels against which to judge students' perfonnances must take some account of what students are able typically to achieve in order to set reasonable expectations. Thus, even when the judgments of achievement are criterion referenced, the choice of criteria is at least, in part, nonn referenced.
7.8 Whichever style of assessment is used, the reports to parents provide some grounds for judging how their children are progressing. Whether the reports actually become a credential with which a student's progress is controlled is a further point. If grade-promotion is not automatic, then the report can provide the measure in tenns of which a decision is made regarding the student's promotion to the next grade. The Committee of Inquiry into Education in Western Australia recommended that grade promotion not be automatic and that criterion referenced measures of performance be used to determine a student's placement (2). This Committee also supported grade promotion related to performance (see paragraphs 9.4 to 9.7).
Public Certification
7.9 Various forms of public certification of educational achievement have been developed under the authority of agencies external to the schools to mark key points of transition from education to employment or from one level of education to the next.
Certificates once marked the end of primary education but they were abandoned when the period of compulsory schooling was extended to the secondary level. At the secondary level the Year 10 certificate has been the qualification most widely used as the one marking the stage at which the majority of students made the transition from school to work. In Victoria and South Australia, the provision of a Leaving Certificate at Year 11 encouraged deferment of this transition for one year and produced higher retention rates in Year 11 than those obtaining in other States. In all systems, the Year 12 certificate has been a prized credential for the minority who persisted to achieve it and the access to more selective employment or higher education which it allowed.
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7. 10 As enrolments in Years II and 12 have grown and as fewer full time jobs have been available to Year 10 leavers, the Year 10 certificates have declined in value. If 12 years of schooling were to become virtually universal, the Year 12 certificates would become the key certificates of educational achievement for all students, while perhaps continuing as the qualifications with which a proportion seeks access to higher education.
Various attempts have been made to cope with these two purposes which Year 12 certificates increasingly must serve.
7. II The most common approach has been to try to separate functions by maintaining a restricted set of subjects and a 'matriculation' certificate for the students expecting to seek admission to higher education and developing new subjects for the other students. In Victoria, results in the traditional subjects (Group I) and the new subjects (Group 2) are distinguished on the Higher School Certificate. In Western Australia, only results in the Tertiary Admissions Examination subjects have been reported on the student's tertiary admission statement, while these results (in a different form), together with results in any general subjects taken, are reported on the student's Certificate of Secondary Education.
In South Australia, separate certificates have also been used for the Public Examinations Board subjects with which higher education admission is obtained and the new Secondary School Certificate subjects. Students receive one or other or both, depending on their choices of subjects.
7. 12 Another approach has been to use different documentation for the different purposes rather than for the different categories of subjects. In Queensland, the Senior Certificate provides the record of achievement; and a separate statement, based on differently collected information about student achievement, advises details of eligibility for admission to higher education. A similar approach is used in the Australian Capital Territory, although the Secondary College Record providing the record of achievement and the Supplementary Information for Tertiary Entrance are distinct sections of the same certificate.
7.13 The development of the various Year 12 certificates can obscure the fact that considerable numbers of young people obtain post-compuls0fY education and access to higher education through avenues other than upper secondary school. Many are in full- time or part-time technical or vocational training through which they obtain an employment credential which may enhance their prospects for subsequent access to higher education as a mature age student. In Victorian T AFE colleges there is also a Tertiary Orientation Program operating as an explicit alternative to upper secondary education in preparing students for higher education. In fact, students in this program are treated less favourably than Higher School Certificate students for university admissions, but nevertheless, it stands as a discrete option for students and offers a distinct certificate.
A Single Secondary Certificate
7.14 The post-compulsory education system operates, in effect, as a set of discrete streams and has the tendency to produce alternatives to the main certificate for the various streams. This diversification may be useful in providing courses more appropriate to many students than the traditional upper secondary ones, but there are problems in allowing the educational system to develop a set of mutually exclusive streams. One is that studies in the most sought after stream tend to be seen as more important than those in other streams,
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with consequences for student attitudes and also the level of resources provided for the various streams. A second problem is that areas of knowledge may become fragmented, in particular separating what is seen as 'academic' from what is seen as 'applied' or 'practical'. A third problem is that streams impose early choices on students, probably from Year 10, and can limit subsequent opportunities to change. Fourthly, the production of alternatives to the main certificate creates confusion for those outside the education system who seek to use them, for example, in the initial selection for possible employment.
7.15 A single certificate at Year 12, able to accommodate the diversity of studies offered and the diversity of purposes to which the final year certificate is now applied, could be a significant way of alleviating these problems. There may be a diminishing need for such a certificate to accommodate the early years of technical and further education because increasingly students will complete 12 years of primary and secondary education before entering technical and further education. As full secondary participation becomes a reality and most students complete Year 12, the demand for a meaningful certificate for employment purposes will rise. Where TAFE institutions build up a general educational offering at Years 11 and 12 level as a direct alternative to the general education offered in secondary schools, the case for accommodating such an offering within a single certificate is much stronger.
SELECTION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Categorization of Subjects
7.16 Reference has been made in Chapter 3 to the development of new subjects, not specifically preparatory for higher education, in an effort to cater for the broadening student group in upper secondary education. Enrolments in these subjects have remained small in virtually all systems, so they have failed in their purpose of broadening the curriculum. Their failure to attract students is more a reflection on the structure within which they are presented than a consequence of any inherent weakness in them. Some schools simply do not offer mallY of the new subjects and so restrict their students' choices (3). Even where a wide range of subjects of both types is available, students may choose exclusively among those which count for admission to higher education simply to keep open the option of admission. Students with no intention of exercising that option may also make the same choice in the belief that potential employers will rate those subjects highly because of their endorsement by universities.
7.17 There have been several responses to the failure of these new subjects to attract students. One has been to seek the transfer of some of the new subjects to the category which may count for admission to higher education. If such subjects are altered significantly to tailor them to their new category's purpose they can become of less value to the students who might best be served by them. A second response has been to argue for the removal of any distinction among subjects and to allow all of them to count for admission to higher education. A third response has been to encourage higher education institutions to consider performance in some subjects from the new grouP. without formally changing the categorization of the subjects. In Tasmania, students may count 93
two non-approved Level III subjects or two Level II subjects, together with their four approved Level III subjects, for university entrance. In South Australia the colleges, and in Victoria the colleges and some universities, are willing to consider performances in some subjects which are not in the traditional 'category. A fourth response, being implemented in Western Australia, is to base admissions to higher education on as little as half of a student's Year 12 study while still requiring satisfactory performance in the other half. The number of subjects in the category which may count for higher education admission has been reduced to encourage all students to consider seriously subjects in both sets.
Farms of Assessment
7. 18 All systems include a component of school assessment in the final results recorded on students' certificates. Except for subjects explicitly designated as school subjects, some attempt is made to ensure comparability of assessm'ents across schools.
These attempts range from visits to schools by moderators who scrutinise students' work and teachers' assessments, through meetings of teachers at which assessment standards are compared, to the use of external assessments against which the school assessments are first scaled before the two are combined.
7. 19 As a general rule, external assessments are used for subjects which may count directly for admission to higher education while the other forms of moderation are used for the newer subjects. The external measures are subject examinations on the content of syllabuses, except in Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory, where the Australian Scholastic Aptitude Test is used as a measure of general academic ability. In Victoria and South Australia, curr~nt discussion papefs canvass th~ possibility of abandoning or reducing the use of external examinations in favour of the other forms of moderation of school assessments (4). When Queensland abolished external examinations in 1970, there was considerable overtesting of students as teachers sought sufficient infonnation to protect themselves against challenge and there was significant inflation of grades awarded as teachers sought to enhance their students' prospects of a place in higher education. Queensland persisted with the use of these moderated school assessments for reporting subject results on the Senior Certificate but, for determining admission to higher education, replaced them with assessments scaled against the Australian Scholastic Aptitude Test.
Selection Criterion
7.20 The criterion for the selection of school leavers to enter higher education, derived from the various measures of their achievements in a range of subjects, is typically a single index. The usual index is an aggregate of assessments in the separate subjects and it allows a rank-ordering of all school Ieaver applicants and an automated selection rule that involves simply working down the order until a quota is filled.
7.21 In the calculation of aggregates there are difficulties which have generated calls for the abandonment of aggregation. Chief among these is the use of scaled subject results in the aggregates. Abandonment of scaling by secondary education authorities would simply divert the problem, not avoid it, if the higher education institutions were themselves to do the scaling and aggregating. If no scaling at all were undertaken, the
higher education institutions may try to avoid aggregating elements which are not comparable by restricting eligible subjects to a small group of relatively similar ones.
These institutions would then be exercising increased control over upper secondary students' subject enrolments through the establishment of a restrictive set of pre- requisites. In addition, in the absence of scaling but the presence of aggregation, student subject choices may alter to take account of the strength of the competition for marks.
7.22 There is also another serious risk with the use of any single index such as an aggregate, the risk that it will be invested with far more status than its level of validity and reliability justify. Other users of the certificate, such as employers, may also use the admissions aggregate and ignore the information available in the full set of subject results.
The ready availability of an index can demean other forms of assessment and certification of achievement in secondary education.
7.23 Despite the heavy dependence on an aggregate for selection of school leavers, many students are now selected by other means. In 1983, 6200 new university undergraduates, or 15 per cent of the total number of commencing students, were admitted without a Year 12 credential. Also, alternative Year 12 certificates are being used increasingly.
Considerations of Equity
7.24 As enrolments in upper secondary education grow and the demand for places in higher education increases, the equity with which those places are allocated becomes increasingly important. With syllabus based external examinations there is the risk that students from different schools will be unequally prepared. In one study students from government schools were shown to achieve as well at the University of Melbourne as did students from non-government schools with higher aggregate scores on the Higher School Certificate (5). Although they were apparently equally well prepared for higher education, those from non-government schools were apparently better prepared for the Higher School Certificate examinations.
7.25 In the scaling of results to take account of differences in the quality of candidates in different subjects, sub-groups of students can be inequitably treated by the method of adjustment. The most notable cases are in those language subjects in which the majority of students has native fluency where their results are scaled to the level of their performances on an aptitude measure or in their other subjects, performances which are likely to be inhibited by their lack of fluency in English.
7.26 Abandonment of syllabus-based examinations may remove the inequitable effects of variations in schools from the variations in students' performances but may introduce other sources of inequity. General ability measures, for example, may be independent of the syllabuses and even relatively insensitive to schooling but may be sensitive to differences in home background and thus to socio-economic status.
7.27 There is no ready solution to the problems for the upper secondary school of the requirements of the transition from secondary to tertiary education. Each solution currently being proposed has its own risks. That is no reason to maintain the status quo but it is reason to consider carefully the full implications of any new policy proposals and to monitor the effects of any changes which are made.
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