More than 30,000 students do this HSC subject. Fewer than 200 get top marks
A combination of peer pressure and misconceptions around scaling may have driven more students to take standard English instead of the Advanced option last year.
About one in three English students (33.8 per cent) studied the advanced course in last year's HSC, falling from 35.4 per cent in 2019. In comparison, the proportion of students studying standard English has increased – up from 42.8 per cent in 2019 to 44.2 per cent in 2024.
It is not just more students who are choosing to study standard English over the advanced course – there has also been a large performance gap observed between the two.
Fewer than 200 of the almost 33,000 standard students in 2024 achieved a Band 6 – a mark of 90 or above – in last year's HSC, compared with more than 3800 of the 25,000 advanced students.
This means fewer than 1 in 100 standard English students received a Band 6 result, compared with 15 in every 100 advanced English students. It is a similar story when Band 5 results are included in the mix – more than half of last year's English advanced cohort achieved marks of 80 or above, compared with just 12 per cent of standard students.
Kane Piper, head of English at Grafton High School, said the significant gap in outcomes did not surprise him.
'Ever since I can remember, that [gap] has been there, and it is a little bit of an anomaly across subjects because I don't think there's any other subject that has a similar [gap].'
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