How your HSC works
- Image: Kristina Bell, Northern Beaches Christian School, (detail) ARTEXPRESS, HSC 2007
Step 9 – Finally: your results
At last we get to the end of the year. It’s more than a year since you began your HSC studies and Year 12 is well behind you. All your exams are marked and your marks safely stored on the Board’s computers. You’ve checked your assessment ranks online in November, and your school assessment marks have been moderated to ensure you have a fair assessment mark.
The judges have made their decision about the difficulty of this year’s questions and the way you and all the other HSC students this year performed against the same academic standards used since 2001.
An independent panel of very highly-qualified experts in educational assessment (the HSC Consultative Committee) have met to verify the marks awarded in the judging process. The committee meets with judges to review the process and confirm the results. Individual marks are also reviewed to ensure you and your classmates are not unfairly affected by an abnormal result.
Your exam marks and your moderated assessment marks have all been aligned to the standards and we have these two marks for each of your subjects safely stored on our system.
How does all this testing and calculating and checking and double checking and triple checking turn into the trusted qualification you will take with you into the adult world?
Final calculations
The final result of your subjects is the simplest calculation so far. We take your moderated, aligned assessment mark and your aligned exam mark, add them together and divide by two to get a number out of 100: this is your HSC mark. This number decides what Performance Band, from 1 up to 6, will describe your final achievement for that course in the HSC.
HSC marks from 90 to 100 will receive a Band 6, marks from 80 to 89 will receive a Band 5, and so on until Band 1, which covers everything from 0 to 49.
Now we have your marks and your Band for each course, we begin the final process to prepare your marks for delivery via the internet, SMS, landline and mail. Once again, your unique Student Number plays an important role in guaranteeing you receive the correct results. Special computer programs prepare the same results for the four different delivery systems and each is tested internally to ensure there are no problems for the day of release. As well as your Student Number, you need your HSC PIN to access your results. Remember this is different to your UAC Number and PIN.
When the Board is sure all results are ready for delivery, the merit lists are calculated and prepared for publication on the Board’s website.
The results are published a week or more before Christmas. The Universities Admissions Centre releases the ATAR the day after the HSC results are out.
We help UAC to calculate the university entry rankings each year by providing them with:
- your moderated assessment marks (before alignment with the standards), and
- your total exam marks (before alignment with the standards).
HSC results services
If you have any questions or concerns about your results there are different services available you may decide to use. Read more about these Results Services, Including the HSC Results Inquiry Centre telephone hotline (13 11 12) available after results are released.
Useful links
- Determining a Student’s Achievement in the HSC
- Understanding HSC results
- The Board of Studies provides replacement statements for lost or mislaid certificates issued by the Board of Studies, past Boards or the New South Wales Department of Education.