Archive Article: The HSC. October 98.
December 22, 2008

The Higher School Certificate season is with us once again. Students and their relatives are under a great deal of stress. But are we making too much of the HSC results?

Much of the stress that students feel is due to the way in which the HSC is seen as such a final examination, and that a failure in the HSC is seen as virtually terminal.

There is life after the HSC. First, the HSC results only measure a student’s skill in the examination at a particular time. The HSC has no predictive capacity. I have known students to come up to university with brilliant HSC results but then fade away at university, meanwhile students with less than glowing HSC results do well. Indeed, even universities recognize the limitations of HSC results because of their systems of admitting students on criteria other than HSC results, such as experience in the workplace.

Second, no examination is ever final. This is the era of lifelong learning. All the political parties recognize the importance of lifelong learning – even if this is often not reflected in the spending policies by Treasury! In the new global economy, an educated population is no guarantee of success – but it is a guarantee against failure. No country with a growing economy has a poorly educated population. The importance of lifelong education means that a student can get another chance at learning. In my own case, for example, I was educated in the English system and failed the two major examinations at the age of 11 and 13 and so left school at the age of 15 (one of the best decisions I ever made). My education began after I left school and I got my act together. I was later able to get a BA degree and a PhD in a net period of six years.

This is not to encourage students simply to ignore the HSC but simply to reassure them that if they do badly this time they will have other opportunities at the HSC. Failure is never final.

While on the subject of schools, I see that there is again pressure to create some form of league tables of schools based on examination results. This is a symptom of the lunacy of economic rationalism, whereby statisticians dominate our lives with their love of measurements.

A league table of schools would ignore the realities of schools. How a school ranks in such a league table would depend partly on the quality of students attending the school. Students from a lower socio-economic group would have greater hurdles to overcome – not least the poor self-image that comes from attending a school that is notorious for being so low in the league table.

More to the point, as I have just argued with the HSC, there is more to education than just passing examinations. A problem with economic rationalists is that they measure only what can be measured. There is much in a school’s life that cannot be measured.

Schools should be producing good citizens, with a love of learning, who will be able to contribute to society – and not just calculating machines skilled at passing examinations.

BROADCAST ON FRIDAY OCTOBER 30 1998 ON RADIO 2GB’S “BRIAN WILSHIRE PROGRAMME” AT 9 PM, AND ON NOVEMBER 1 1998 ON “SUNDAY NIGHT LIVE” AT 10.30 PM