Page 4153 - Week 13 - Thursday, 6 December 2007
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(7) Is the Minister aware that (a) ACT UAIs are calculated in accordance with the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) agreement that the students of all States and Territories are assumed to be of equal ability for the purposes of tertiary entrance score calculations and (b) Dr Daley's report on page 2 states, in line with this MCEETYA equality assumption, that this assumption of the equivalence of Year 10 populations in different parts of Australia in terms of their academic performance, was the basis of an agreement between the States about 1995 to provide comparability of tertiary entrance ranks for immediate school leavers across the different state systems, despite the assumption being mostly untested and largely unquestioned;
(8) Will the Minister challenge the equality assumption referred to in part (7) in view of the clear evidence that this assumption is implausible, contrary to large bodies of evidence that suggests that ACT students are academically stronger than their NSW counterparts, and very unfair on ACT students;
(9) Does the Minister acknowledge that the processes used to calculate the UAIs of NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) students in 2006 is set out in detail in the publication titled Report on the Scaling of the 2006 NSW Higher School Certificate which recently became available on the Universities Admissions Centre website (at
(10) Can the Minister supply the figures for the ACT senior secondary education system corresponding to the NSW HSC figures as in part (9), specifically how many (a) students made up the 2006 ACT system UAI cohort (in other words, how many students in ACT colleges or schools received an ACT senior secondary system UAI in 2006), (b) of the students in the 2006 ACT system UAI cohort (the answer to part (a)) received an ACT Year 10 Certificate in 2004 and (c) of the students in the 2006 ACT system UAI cohort received a NSW Year 10 School Certificate in 2004;
(11) How many of the students in the 2005 ACT system UAI cohort received (a) an ACT and (b) a NSW Year 10 School Certificate in 2003;
(12) Does the Minister acknowledge that the statistics called for in parts (10) and (11) are necessary to accurately compare the UAI outcomes of ACT students with those of NSW in 2005 and 2006, given that NSW UAIs are percentile ranks based on the Year 10 School Certificate Cohort, as explained in the Report on the Scaling of the 2006 NSW Higher School Certificate;
(13) Do the statistics called for in parts (10) and (11) appear in any BSSS or DET annual report or other documents available to the public via their websites; if so, in what document(s) do these statistics appear; if not, will the Minister please ensure that these statistics are reported in DET or BSSS annual reports or otherwise made publicly available via DET or BSSS websites in future.
Mr Barr: The answer to the member’s question is as follows:
(1) (a) My response to QON 1662 (1) indicated why the changed Year 12 candidature in 2006 was not included in the 2007 ACT Board of Senior Secondary Studies (BSSS) Manual.
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