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High Notes, Vol 23 No 19, June 24 2022

From the Principal

High Talent

Congratulations to our undefeated Opens Basketball Team on their dominant win in the state final of the CHS Schools Knockout Championships. Isaac Ayoubi starred in the  final against Balgowlah Boys with 52 points. Well done to Henry Lau (10S), Danil Vasiliev (11F), Filip Spanovic (11R), Zac Taylor (12F), Richard Lu (12S), Jerry Lau (10T) and Blake Mulholland (12T).

At the Australian Intermediate Schools Fencing Championships last weekend our Sabre Team (gold): Ethan Li (8F), Azam Mohamed (8M), Akith Perera (9E), Andrew Pye (9R); Epee Team (gold): Tommy Xu (9E), Kelvin Chen (9F), Jamison Lai (9E), Xavier Perry (9M); and Foil Team (silver): Daniel Kim (9M), Joshua Wang (9E), Benjamin Pham (8R), Lyndon Chow (8E). Individual medallists were: Individual Epee event: Tommy Xu (9E) won gold, Xavier Perry (9M) and Kelvin Chen (9F) equal bronze. Congratulations to all our competing fencers!  Ethan Li (10F) is competing at the NSW All Schools Golf Championships in Yamba as a member of the Sydney East Regional team. Congratulations, Ethan! Well done to Ike Matsuoka (SHS-2021) who was awarded a UNSW Co-op Scholarship in Accountancy.

Dean Nguyen (12S) was notified as the recipient of a Youth Community Service Award to be awarded at Government House. Well deserved, Dean! Congratulations to Wensen Dong (8R) for his national first place in the Oxford University Computing Challenge – Junior Division. Great result!

June 30 is EOFY time

Starting to think about making a donation? The EOFY is a week away. Act now and join the growing number of Australians giving something back to society to help others. You will feel better after having made a contribution to a worthy cause. If you have intended to make a tax-deductible donation to our SHSF Building Fund [The Governors Centre Finishing Touches Appeal] or to the SHSF Advancement Fund [Fairland Rebuilding Project] but haven’t yet done so, I invite you to make that donation, as I have done, before the end of the financial year. 

If you prefer assisting The Science Demountable Laboratory or Library Airconditioning Project make your donation to the Sydney Boys High School Building Fund. If you have a sports focus or give to one of our ASF Projects. There are so many great achievements coming from the boys in a diverse range of endeavours. In order to consolidate, maintain and improve upon our resources for them and services to them, they would really benefit from your financial support. I ask for your help to make High an even better place in which our students can learn and grow.

Interpreting Year 11 Reports- Semester One

All Year 11 students should have their reports. Parents should be aware that the information upon which the first semester report marks are based, might be a measure of just one or two skill sets or a limited number of completed topics, or just one task, and thus a proportionately fewer number of marks. These marks are extrapolated to produce a mark out of 100 or 50 per unit. In some cases, where students have missed the only task set, a blank or N/A might appear against the student’s name for a course on the report. Individual marks for courses supplied by teachers are recorded and run against an ATAR predictor program. All the raw marks are converted into scaled marks per unit. Students missing a mark for a course will be given the score of the average of their other course scores for ATAR calculation purposes. In the iterative scaling process, students’ marks in one course are compared against all the other students who completed the same course and against their performances in their other courses. The data we use are last year’s HSC results for High. We shape current data, in terms of means and standard deviations, against the previous year’s actual HSC data. The essential comparative assumption is that students, as a cohort, will perform at or around the same standard this year, as they did last year. This process can skew results (positively or negatively) if students miss tasks in several courses. Of course, individual courses have better or worse results on any given year, but overall, the predictor yields ATAR ‘guesses’ that are usually reliable to the +/- 1 level. A scaled score out of 50 is calculated for each course on a one-unit basis. English and Mathematics Extension courses are given a scaled mark out of 150. In English, the relative contributions of Advanced and Extension can be distorted if a wide discrepancy exists in performance in each course. Accuracy improves in Year 12 when only 10 units are considered for the ATAR calculation  Any student studying a course outside the school is given the average per unit of their other courses, instead of missing the values altogether. Students good at PE may be negatively affected with PE removed from the overall calculation of performance.
Dr K A Jaggar
Principal