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High Notes, Vol 24 No 19, June 23 2023

From the Principal

High Talent

Eric Scholten (11R) and Joshua Li (9S) have been invited by the Australian Maths Trust to participate in the 2023 AMOC Senior Contest. This invitation only competition is for highly accomplished student mathematicians. Congratulations, boys!  High took home the AJ Rae Shield for Boys by scoring the highest accumulated points from the teams’ Fencing competition held last weekend. SBHS Senior Foil A Team (Dean Johnsun (11F), Daniel Kim (10M), Henry Lin (11S), Andrew Wang (11S) won Silver; Senior Epee A Team (Jarrod Su (12R), Jack Wang (12M), Tommy Xu (10E), Xavier Perry (10M)) won the Gold; Senior Epee B Team (Kelvin Chen (10F), Jack Huang (12T), Jamison Lai (10E), Tian Yang (11E) won the Silver; Senior Sabre A Team (Jayden Ho (11M), Samuel Hui (11T), Mahesh Karki (10S), Oscar Shi (11S) won the Gold; and the Senior Sabre B Team (Hayden Chen (10M), Andrew Pye (10R), Nathan Lee (10R), Akith Perera (10E) won equal Bronze. Well done to all our team members.

At the Australian Intermediate Schools Fencing Championships held in Melbourne, in the Boy's Individual Foil, Benjamin Dang (9R) won equal Bronze; in the Boy's Individual Epee, Hudson Cai (9M) won Silver; in the Boy's Individual Sabre Ethan Li (9F) won equal Bronze. Well done indeed to our intermediate fencers at national level. For the teams events - Boy's Intermediate Foil Teams - Benjamin Dang (9R), Tom Ye (8T), Lyndon Chow (9E), George Mermelas (9F) won equal Bronze; Boy's Intermediate Epee Teams - Hudson Cai (9M), Vihaan Rajit (9E), Benjamin Wu (9F), Daniel Zhu (8R) won the Gold; and Boy's Intermediate Sabre Teams: Ethan Li (9F), Oliver Xie (8R), Aaron Li (8S), Kenzie Yuan (8S) won equal Bronze. Congratulations to all our successful teams!

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. Since the number of assessment tasks allowable was reduced, some courses have had no formal assessment tasks. 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.

We use all 12 Preliminary Units to calculate our ATAR estimate (rather than 10 as in the HSC calculations), for two reasons. First, we would like students to receive a realistic appraisal of their progress in State terms as well as relative to their peers at High. Second, we want them to know their relative performance in each of their courses, in terms of scaled marks contributing to their TES score for ATAR calculation. Students can use this data later in the year to make decisions about which courses to add, continue or terminate for their HSC year. Their choices are restricted, given that 12 Preliminary units can only be reduced to ten for the HSC, nine if an extension course is added (as in music extension) after successful acceleration, or eight if an accelerant performed well in two HSC units in a course in Year 11. Big fluctuations in rank order can occur in the transition from Stage 5 to Stage 6 work. High scoring Stage 5 electives might be replaced by more difficult Stage 6 courses. Students good at mathematics and science have one extra mathematics unit and up to four extra science units added into their calculated ATAR as compared to their Year 10 report calculation.  By contrast, those weak in English have to count one extra unit of English in their calculated score. Students may find the intellectual challenge and workload of Stage 6 a bit of a shock in their first semester of learning. In short, the reasons for big fluctuations in rank order are many and varied. The point of the exercise is to determine strengths and weaknesses in various courses and to gauge how strong student interest in them is, as evidenced by their commitment to trying to master them.

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 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, go to . 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.

Sentence Conscious Pedagogy: Writing at length….one step at a time.

To craft quality writing, students need to follow four basic steps: planning, outlining, drafting, revising and editing.

For planning and outlining - gather information; distinguish between essential and irrelevant material; put ideas and supporting details into categories; arrange the ideas and details in an appropriate order or importance, logic or sequence; and develop a topic sentence for a paragraph or an introductory paragraph for a composition.

For revising and editing – vary your sentence structure; make your sentences more informative and interesting; check word use - vivid, varied and precise; use transition words and phrases to connect your ideas. Does the writing follow a logical sequence?  Is the writing coherent? Does it address the topic? Remove extraneous, irrelevant or unnecessary words.
Dr K A Jaggar
Principal