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High Notes, Vol 23 No 20, July 01 2022

From the Principal

High Talent

Congratulations to Oscar Shi (10S) who has been selected in the Australian Fencing Team (Junior) to compete at the London Fencing Championships of the Commonwealth Games from August 8 -19. Well done to our combined Volleyball GPS Honours Team representatives – Owen Seong (12E), Paul Fang (12S), Edward Ly (11M) and Dimitrios Logothetis (11E). GPS defeated CAS in a close 5- set contest. GPS was coached by Mr Kay. Congratulations to Alex Huang (9R) who will compete for the Table Tennis NSW U15B team at the Table Tennis National championships. Jason Yan (12S) has been shortlisted for the Top 50 Trailblazer Awards which recognise students who have used their final years at school to make an impact in their community. Good luck Jason!

End of Term 2

As always, Term 2 is the most hectic of the year with the compression of assessing, mark recording, giving papers back with feedback, writing reports and interacting with students about their progress. It is relentless in that there is only the June long weekend to break up the reporting cycle for six Year groups.  I want to thank staff for the way that they have met deadlines and submitted report data to allow the process to run smoothly. The vast majority of students have had discussions with the principal and received their reports in person.

Our first full cycle of Sentral reporting took a lot of time to set up and manage. Thank you to Jamie Kay for organising and managing the process so well. Thank you to George Barris for his support. Additional stresses were placed on our administration and our teaching routines with the high rate of sickness due to COVID necessitating at least 5 teachers per day to cover our classes. It has increased John Prorellis’s workload very considerably since February of 2020. I thank him on the school community’s behalf for keeping our teaching and learning programs operational.

Interpreting Year 10 Reports - Semester 1

Boys in Year 10 have had their reports handed out after consultation with the Principal. Year 10 is an important time to try out electives to help identify possible stage 6 courses that students might be interested in studying. Equally, it can confirm which courses students do not enjoy and will not pursue in stage 6. Parents should be aware that there are changes to the way the rank order is calculated in Year 10. HDs (6 points) and credits (3 points) etc…are no longer added together to form the scores on which the rank order is based. We use individual marks supplied by teachers. We calculate ATAR equivalent scores for those marks based on twelve units (six subjects). PE is included in the calculations as 30% of two units (a course) because it has only four periods and is a practical course only in Year 10. PASS elective scores are calculated in the usual way. Boys good at PE and taking PASS may be advantaged in the ranking. Rank order variations can be large between Years 9 and 10 for these and other reasons. For example, boys take on additional electives which do not have to include history or geography. More than 60 boys are attempting stage 6 courses as accelerating students and they are assessed on stage 6 criteria which are more rigorous than those in stage 5. Sometimes, they spend more time than they should on their accelerated course and get their time management out of balance.

Some of their other subjects might have weaker results as a consequence. This can lead to a large rank fluctuation and a reduced ATAR estimate. Some stage 5 electives, like commerce, robotics and filmmaking, are infused with stage 6 concepts and content. The Online elective can only be calculated as the average of the rest of the students’ scores because it is a mastery-based elective -that is, successful completion of 120 hours of self-selected courses with a certificate as proof of completion. That calculation may lower a student’s rank or advantage him because he would have done worse in any other elective. Science is delivered in a series of modules – chemistry, biology and physics. Some boys are much more engaged with one science module rather than another. Regrettably, some boys switch off in subjects they are not planning to pursue in Year 11. These subjects can be electives that they just picked for enjoyment because they had already decided on their Year 11 courses or ones that they chose but with which they have not become engaged. Please bear in mind the possible impacts on ranking in the cohort of these changed contexts when discussing the report with your son. Quiz him about his three electives and how he is engaging with them and whether he is enjoying them and if he is thinking about his stage 6 course selections.

NAIDOC Week Assembly

We were scheduled to hold an assembly to recognise NAIDOC on Thursday. Due to the industrial action this week on Thursday, and there being no other available time slot, we have had to postpone celebrating our NAIDOC week (July 3-10) until Friday, July 22 in week 1 of term 3. We will hold the assembly then.
Dr K A Jaggar
Principal