By Lucy Carroll
Baulkham Hills High HSC student Syed Ahmad can pinpoint the moment when he started thinking seriously about a career in software development.
“I was in year 7 and had just finished at my local primary school, Winston Heights Public, but I didn’t know anyone at Baulkham. So I joined their Tuesday lunchtime computer programming club and became their youngest-ever member,” he says.
Baulkham Hills High student Syed Ahmad collected data on average scores from hundreds of NSW public school annual reports. Credit: James Brickwood
Ahmad had long been interested in web-based games and basic code. But in the first weeks of high school at the programming club his hobby shifted to a more serious pursuit, and he started to hone his skills in complex text-based coding. He studied advanced algorithms after school, entered online coding competitions and an interest in data science followed.
“But when I was choosing my final year subjects at the end of year 10 I started to realise there was not much data out there about HSC results, and especially for the unpopular technology subjects I wanted to do,” he says. “I felt like I was left in the dark.”
The information black hole prompted the year 12 student to turn his attention to researching HSC scaling and average scores across 79 subjects. Over the past two years, he has meticulously gathered data from hundreds of annual school reports and built a website to publish his findings.
A Herald analysis of that data has charted average scores across subjects and highlighted some schools achieving strong results across their whole student cohort. While it aims to present a broader snapshot of results, it does not include schools showing improvements over time or other metrics to show different achievements.
“This whole journey started with me really wanting to get a better idea of what mark I should expect in each of my subjects, and to help me decide which subjects were worth keeping and dropping,” he says.
“Usually, it’s just band 6 results that are reported, and that’s all that is publicly available. But only band 6 data was inadequate for me since it failed to give a full view of performance by only reporting data for the top band of students.”
Ahmad was particularly driven to know more about average scores, and scaling, in two of his chosen subjects: software design and development, and information processes and technology.
He is one of just 1700 HSC students taking information processes and technology this year, the lowest number in a decade, down from 3000 students enrolled in 2013. HSC software design numbers have also fallen to a near 10-year low.
“I really wanted to do technology subjects because I enjoy them. But there isn’t much data about them, or even many of my peers that I could talk to about the subjects.”
His website, which also contains an HSC scaling tool, aims to give “a broader measure of results that applies across schools and subjects,” he says. “Just showing band 6 results also means so many achievements across so many schools aren’t recognised and go under the radar.
“In smaller schools their band 6s can fluctuate a lot, but their average scores don’t as much.”
Ahmad, 18, began creating the site in year 11, squeezing it in after school, study breaks and on weekends. “I wanted the data to be easily accessible to everyone, not just those who know how to access it.
“I also found the strong correlation between socio-economic advantage and school performance to be quite shocking. Which ultimately led me to wanting to publish more, and bring greater awareness about how each school is performing.”
He said his analysis found that students at comprehensive and selective schools performed similarly in the toughest maths course, extension 2, and socio-economic advantage also made less of a difference to student results in that subject.
Ahmad is one of 70,000 students who will sit HSC exams next month. He plans to study a double degree in commerce and computer science at the University of New South Wales.
“The world is changing so fast. But I know I want to do software development eventually and more with data. I hope to build on my skills and sort of see where it takes me.”
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