Every year, thousands of teachers across New South Wales take on the enormous responsibility of HSC marking, playing an essential role in ensuring fairness, accuracy, and consistency in the state’s most important assessment.
Around 5,000 to 5,500 experienced Year 12 teachers from public, private, and Catholic schools are entrusted by NESA with marking exams. The process begins with detailed briefings and practice sessions, either online or in corporate marking centres, where teachers learn to apply guidelines consistently by working through sample responses. Once trained and calibrated, the marking itself begins, usually from mid-October through to mid-November for written exams, with oral, major project and performance-based assessments happening earlier in the year.
At IGS, many of our own teachers are among these markers, senior markers, judges, exam committee members, or supervisors of marking leading a whole marking operation, and their experiences illustrate just how valuable the process is – not only for the system as a whole but also for their own professional growth and their students’ learning.
Mr Thom Marchbank, Deputy Principal Academic was a senior marker for the English Extension 2 major work course for six years, leading a marking team in their accurate and reliable application of the marking criteria. For him, marking “sharpens your understanding of what good work looks like,” making possible a much more effective understanding of how to “help students to achieve more highly”.
Ms Susie Bolt, Head of English, has marked the English Extension 1 course for several years. She says it feeds back so richly into her teaching, “helping students to hone their voices and build confidence in this wonderful and challenging course. Seeing what happens at the marking centre helps confirm and clarify your approach as well as identify areas and strategies to support students to be their creative best and build a deep and critical understanding of their course texts and conceptual frameworks … I always feel proud of our students and comfortable and confident that they are being led well – and performing their best.”
Ms Nicole Pool, Assistant Head of English Stage 6, has immense experience as a marker across multiple English courses, from EAL/D and Standard through to Advanced and Extension 1. Beyond this, Ms Pool also served for three years on the HSC Examination Committee, contributing to the design and refinement of the questions that students across NSW would sit. “My experience as a marker provided me with deep insight into the standards and expectations of HSC responses, which in turn informed and strengthened my contributions as a committee member,” Ms Pool says. Being involved from the earliest stages of exam design through to final approval was, in Ms Pool’s words, “deeply fulfilling,” offering both a sense of purpose and the knowledge that this work supported educational equity across the state.
In Sciences, Head of Science Ms Liz Turner has marked the HSC Chemistry examination since 2019, and also participated in the NESA Standards setting research project 2022 which investigated the judging process of HSC Chemistry. As such, she has a deep understanding of the Chemistry examination paper, its marking guidelines, and the standards materials. These experiences gave her a “thorough understanding of the requirements of student of work at each band for the HSC”. This means that she can “accurately identify which band a student is in from the question and their response based on their terminology, logical sequencing and skills shown”.
Our Languages staff too have an incredibly high level of HSC marking experience, with many teachers not only acting as markers but having held senior marking roles that direct marking teams or whole marking operations. For instance, Chinese teacher and Head of High School Languages, Ms Shuyi Wu’s has had experience not only as a marker but as senior marker, as a judge, and in other project roles. She describes HSC marking as “an excellent form of professional development,” providing clarity about how assessment standards are applied and allowing her to design more targeted learning activities back in her classroom. For Ms Wu, working in leadership roles – coordinating teams, mentoring colleagues, and meeting the intense demands of deadlines – has been especially positive. “Working closely with other markers as part of a team was both supportive and rewarding,” she says, and her roles have positively impacted marking at the state level.
For Head of PDHPE, Mr Walid Baghdadi, marking insights have been practical and immediate, enabling him to “deepen my understanding of HSC marking expectations and integrate this knowledge into my teaching practice to better support and extend my students’ learning”.
For Ms Sandra Veljanovski, Director of Art, Design and Media, HSC marking provides “a fantastic opportunity to develop a deep understanding of the HSC exam”. She reflects that as markers, “we have such valuable discussions about how we can award marks to students in a variety of ways”; these include “in-depth discussions about what an essay at each mark looks like, and being able to bring that back to the classroom is an incredible opportunity”. Ms Veljanovski also loves the synergy and teamwork that marking provides – that “experience of calibrating across teams and then hitting a high accuracy rhythm together when marking”.
Head of Mathematics Ms Cassandra Church emphasises, in her experience of marking, that “preparing students for the HSC is not just about teaching Mathematics but also about teaching them how to communicate their reasoning clearly under exam conditions. Knowing exactly what working students need to show to achieve full marks is invaluable, and the layout of a solution plays a critical role.” Impressively, she has “even identified correct responses that other markers initially overlooked, which highlighted just how important clear presentation is for ensuring students receive the marks they deserve.”
For Ancient History Teacher Dr Alexander Toomey-Westcott, marking has enabled him to see “exactly what the marking centre is looking for in relation to the marking criteria”. He says that the “process can be very opaque without this experience,” and that in terms of his own subject, which has a wide range of elective topics, “it has been enlightening to see exactly how the system works with so many moving parts and still give a very rigorous assessment of a student’s abilities, regardless of whether they are studying the fall of the Roman Republic, New Kingdom Egypt, or the wars between Persia and Greece.”
Marking the HSC, in the end, is both a professional duty and a privilege: a chance to help safeguard the fairness, accuracy, and credibility of one of the most significant assessments in the country. For our school, it is a source of immense pride that our teachers serve not only their own students but the entire state in this way, helping to uphold the standards of one of Australia’s most significant educational milestones.