More SACE students achieving As and Bs as lower grades all but disappear
The grades of SA students are improving, with more scoring A than before – but are they getting smarter or is material getting easier?
Year 12 results are booming, with more and more students bagging A grades while Ds and Es have all but disappeared.
The SACE Board and principals say it is better teaching and a “standards-based” assessment system – not any decline in academic rigour – that is behind the improvement.
From 2012 to 2017, the proportion of A grades for full-year subjects awarded to girls rose from 23.3 to 29.7 per cent. Combining As and Bs, it went from 68.4 to 76.8 per cent.
For boys, A grades rose from 15.8 to 19.5 per cent, and As and Bs combined from 55.3 to 64.1 per cent.
“It’s better teaching and the grade curve is shifting,” said SACE Board chief executive Martin Westwell, pictured.
“We’re seeing improvement in every grade band.
“The standard hasn’t changed, the content hasn’t changed. The markers have stayed roughly the same (people), the moderators as well.
“The students are meeting the standard.”
He said as subjects were renewed, grade distribution would be one of many considerations, but the current distribution “isn’t unreasonable”.
D grades more than halved for boys (8.1 down to 3.7 per cent) and dropped even more dramatically for girls (4.7 down to 1.8 per cent).
E grades are now extremely rare. They were six times less common in 2017 for girls, at just 0.3 per cent, than five years earlier. For boys the drop was from 3 to 0.8 per cent.
SA Secondary Principals Association president Peter Mader said subjects under the “old” SACE had broad learning objectives, and students’ work was ranked in order to split them into an even grade distribution.
He said the “new” SACE, which had its first graduates in 2011, had specific standards for each grade band in each subject, and as many students who met those standards got the corresponding grade.
“There should be no complaints if more people are getting As and Bs because it means more people are meeting the (standard) for high achievement,” he said. “I think it is a much fairer system.”
Students are still ranked by the ATAR system for university entry, which Mr Mader called an “anachronism”.
The grade distributions were calculated by Adelaide University’s Dr Brendan Bentley and Hutton Consulting’s Rob Sieben. Dr Bentley said he was focused on the issue of the growing gender gap in results, revealed in the Sunday Mail, rather than the overall trend in grades. He stressed the SACE was “world class level” in its assessment practices.