How do HSC markers decide who gets a Band 6?

For every HSC course, NESA publishes two documents that together describe exactly what earns marks: the course performance descriptions, commonly called band descriptors, which say what a student performing at each band can do, and the marking guidelines released with each past paper, which say what a full-mark answer to each question contained. Together they are the closest thing to an answer key the examination offers, and they are public. A student who learns to read them stops writing what they know and starts writing what the marking guidelines actually reward.

Begin with the verbs. HSC questions are built from a set of glossary verbs, each with a specific demand. Describe wants features. Explain wants cause and effect. Analyse wants components and relationships. Evaluate wants a judgement supported by criteria. A student who answers an evaluate question with a description has produced mid band work where top band marks were available, and no amount of extra content will lift it, because those marks were allocated to the judgement that was never made. Underlining the verb before writing is the cheapest technique in the HSC.

Next, read the band descriptors for the course as a whole. They are written in a compressed dialect, but the pattern is consistent: the top band describes a student who does something sophisticated, sustained and integrated; the middle bands describe the same skills done partially or inconsistently. The useful exercise is to take a recent piece of the student's own work and locate it in the descriptors, honestly. The gap between where the work sits and the top band is the study plan, and it is usually a gap of technique rather than knowledge.

The marking guidelines for past papers are where the descriptors become concrete. For each question they list what a full-mark answer contained, and often what distinguished the top mark from the one below it. A student who marks their own practice responses against these guidelines, before the coach or teacher does, learns to see their work as the marker sees it. At MA99, step five of every session is independent practice with self-marking against the criteria, and the difference between the student's mark and the coach's mark is discussed before anything else. That gap typically narrows over a term, and as it narrows the student's own estimate of a mark starts to match the one that comes back.

Extended responses deserve a particular note. In English, the humanities and the sciences alike, the top band is earned by a response that sustains an argument, integrates evidence, and answers the specific question rather than a nearby one the student prepared for. A very common Band 5 failure is the prepared essay adapted too little to the question asked. A habit that shows up repeatedly in top band scripts is a two minute plan in the margin that maps the argument onto the question's exact wording before a sentence is written.

The practical routine is short. Once a fortnight, take one past paper question, answer it under time, then mark it against the published guideline before anyone else does. Record the lost marks by type. Over a term the record will show two or three patterns that account for most of the loss, and those patterns, not the content, are what to work on. Students who run this routine find the examination familiar, because they have spent the year learning to speak its language.

One caution: the guidelines describe what a full-mark answer contained, not the only way to earn the marks, and students who treat them as a template produce responses that read as recited. The skill is to know what the marker needs to find and to supply it in a response that answers the question actually asked. The plan in the margin does that work: the criteria decide what must be present, the question decides the order and the emphasis.

Edward MaDirector, MA99 Education