Year 12s to find out their SACE results from 8.30am Tuesday
A record number of Year 12s will be logging on this morning to find out their results. Among them is Cicillia Begbia, whose study was all about doing something special for her dad.
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There’s no end of reasons to learn French – it’s the language of love, critical in international relations, and one of the most widely spoken on Earth.
But Cicillia Begbia’s main reason for wanting to master the language as part of her SACE studies was so she could speak it with her dad.
The 17-year-old Nazareth Catholic Community graduate will be among 15,276 SACE completers who will receive their results today – the highest number since the senior secondary qualification was overhauled in 2011.
When Cicillia was just two years old, her family moved to SA from the Central African Republic , where French is an official language. But at home she has mostly spoken the African language Zande with her father. She’s also pretty good at Arabic. “I have been really obsessed with studying French and really wanted to learn this beautiful language for my dad, who speaks French,” she said, adding her father had not had much opportunity to speak it here because their extended family is in Africa and Canada.
“It has always been my dream to be able to have a conversation in French with my dad. Now I’m able to understand French and able to communicate (in it) without using any English. He’s really proud.”
Students can access their results online from 8.30am today. But Cicillia, from Torrensville, who has balanced her studies with supermarket and fast food jobs, said she was going to sleep in, then go to work, and finally check her scores at the end of the day.
“I thought I’d be more nervous than I am,” she said. “I’m going to sleep in so I can be calm.”
Her aim is to head to university and become a clinical psychologist, after doing her SACE research project this year on the psychology behind racial violence.
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A record 2815 students completed their SACE with a vocational education (VET) component, up 13 per cent on last year. Education Minister John Gardner was encouraged by those figures and said the Government would ensure VET courses were “further aligned with industry needs” to secure better job outcomes for young people.
SACE Board chief executive Martin Westwell said: “Students who achieve their SACE show real perseverance and resilience and have set themselves up for future success.”
Year 12 Results are on the rise
15,276 students completed the SACE, the highest number recorded since the senior secondary certificate was revamped in 2011. There were 14,824 last year.
1151 subject Merits were awarded to 892 students, up from 1141 awarded to 902 students last year.
78.5 per cent of students who began their SACE with the Personal Learning Plan in Year 10 in 2017 went on to complete the qualification this year, compared to 78.2 per cent last year.
43.4 per cent of completers included a vocational education component in their studies, up from 42.4 per cent last year.
2815 students (a record) finished a vocational Certificate III level course as part of their SACE, up 13 per cent from 2488 last year.
3976 students in regional SA completed this year, up from 3840 last year.
393 Aboriginal students completed their SACE, up from 364 last year.
296 students (a record) with intellectual disabilities completed their SACE via modified subjects, up from 239 last year.
Don’t make a sport out of judging test scores
Judging schools on standardised test scores alone has become a “quasi-sporting competition” that makes as little sense as comparing hospitals only on appendectomies.
That’s the view SA Secondary Principals’ Association president Peter Mader has put to members in his latest bulletin, following national debate over Australia’s plummeting results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in reading, science and maths. Mr Mader writes Australia has an “obsession” with making comparisons.
“As if something as complex as education could be reduced to what has become a quasi-sporting competition, i.e. state against state, nation against nation,” Mr Mader writes.
“As a profession, we know the purposes of schooling and the full breadth of programs for which we are responsible, and we know that we should be impacting all of these (not just those in the media’s headlights). Given the holistic nature of their care and health service, can you imagine hospital administrators being judged and compared on their hospital’s success rate for appendectomies?”
Mr Mader also points to a blog by US education guru Professor Yong Zhao, who has worked directly with many South Australian schools.
In a post called the PISA Illusion, Prof Zhao writes that there is no empirical evidence that PISA effectively measures skills and knowledge for success in “modern society or the future world”. He laments the “global homogenisation of education and celebration of authoritarian education systems for their high PISA scores, while ignoring the negative consequences”.