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Higher School Certificate, or HSC for short, refers to the assessment applied to secondary school students who undertake years 11 and 12 in New South Wales, Australia; the name is applied both to the overall two-year assessment process and to the final exams.
A student's grade in each subject is determined by a combination of in-school assessment conducted through years 11 and 12 (weighted towards the latter) and an externally-administered final exam held in October or November of year 12. Besides accounting for half the student's final score, external exam results are also used to standardise in-school assessment results between different schools.
These exams are administered by the Board of Studies, and used as an aid to calculate the University Admissions Index (UAI) - which is calculated by the Universities Admissions Centre (UAC), for controlling university admissions, and is essentially an "overall" score for the student calculated across their best subjects.
In this calculation, students' relative performances in different subjects are used to estimate the relative difficulty of each subject, and adjust the combined score accordingly; a student who achieved 50th-percentile rankings in difficult subjects would gain a better UAI than one who achieved the same rankings in easier ones.
The HSC has been criticised for placing so much weight on the final exam, thus causing excessive stress to students and favouring those who cram for exams at the expense of those who work steadily throughout but do not cope well with pressure. There is also criticism that the HSC is oriented heavily towards memorised facts rather than applied skills, meaning that the student finishes with no real understanding of the subject. This is especially true for the Science courses, particularly Physics. Evidence of this comes in the form of drop-out rates in New South Wales Universities.
Another criticism is that artefacts of the scaling process sometimes encourage students to "play the system", taking subjects which make it easier to score the UAIs they need to enter a course rather than subjects which might be more relevant to that course. As one teacher put it, "Our best students take high-level mathematics, physics, and chemistry, so they can get the marks they need to get into a law degree."
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