How can parents help during HSC assessment weeks?

Every Year 12 term has a fortnight in which the assessment calendar folds in on itself: two or three tasks from different faculties, set independently, landing in the same ten days. Families who have mapped the calendar in advance see it coming; families who have not discover it when the student announces on Sunday night that there are three things due by Thursday. The fortnight is survivable either way, but the difference between a good and a bad assessment week is decided by what happens in the home, and most of it can be planned.

The student's plan begins with the calendar and a single decision: which task gets which day. The most heavily weighted task gets the most preparation and the earliest start, because a mark gained there is worth more to the final internal mark than the same mark elsewhere. New content stops ten days out; the last fortnight is for rehearsal under conditions and for the error log, not for learning. Students who are still learning content three days before a task are doing the wrong work at the worst time, and it is usually because the calendar was not read a month earlier.

Sleep is the second decision, and it is made a week out rather than the night before. A student who has been sleeping at one in the morning cannot shift to a ten o'clock bedtime the night before a paper; the body will not cooperate. Seven nights on the assessment schedule, same bedtime, same wake time, produce a student who is alert at nine in the morning because they have been for a week. Revision done between ten at night and one in the morning rarely earns back what the lost sleep costs the next day.

The parents' plan is shorter and harder. Logistics: meals that happen, transport that is arranged, a quiet house, the printer working. Absence of pressure: the student already knows the stakes, and a question about how the paper went, asked at the door, adds nothing but adrenaline. The most useful thing a parent can say in an assessment week is nothing about the assessment, and the second most useful is to ask what they need. A family that manages its own anxiety in this fortnight gives the student something no tutor can supply from outside the home.

The week after matters almost as much as the week itself. Students who finish an assessment fortnight and stop entirely lose the rhythm that took a term to build; students who finish and immediately begin the next fortnight's content at full intensity burn out by the trials. The right pattern is a rest day, then the error log, then the plan for the next fortnight, then the rhythm resumed at ordinary intensity. The papers come back over the following fortnight, and each one is classified and logged before it is filed.

One last habit separates the families who find these fortnights manageable from those who dread them: the debrief. A week after the final task, before the next content arrives, sit down for ten minutes with the calendar and ask three questions. What went to plan? What cost the most marks? What will change before the next crowded fortnight? Written down, those three answers become the first draft of next term's plan, and each assessment fortnight becomes a little easier than the last.

Edward MaDirector, MA99 Education