HSC English

The best compulsory faculty in the HSC

HSC English is its own thing. My favourite teacher in my senior years of high school was my English teacher. He was sarcastic and biting in his humour, which I love. He was brilliant, widely read and thoughtful. He insisted I be better each essay than the last and he told me when I wasn’t putting in the effort I should. When I quoted a Batman novel in an essay in Year 11 he relentlessly made fun of me so I knew not to do that again. I don’t remember everything he said about it, but I have a feeling that’s the day I learned the word vapid. He was a great, if at time unconventional, teacher.

2 Unit English - Aligned the Same

The HSC is designed such that each subject determines academic achievement on its own terms, according to its own descriptors. No one subject is beholden to another in the HSC. The only exception to this is 2 unit English.

At the moment, English Studies Exam, English Standard and English Advanced HSC marks are all aligned to the same standard. That is, according to NESA, an HSC score of 80 in Studies is academically equivalent to an HSC score of 80 in Standard and an 80 in Advanced.

Raw marks, if that’s something you use the Item Analysis to calculate, are different between the three courses, but the final HSC scores, aligned to the band system are academically equivalent across the three courses.

Because of this, when UAC scales 2 unit English, they don’t scale Studies Exam, Standard and Advanced as three separate courses, they just get all those marks, put them all together and scale them as a single 2 unit English course. So, an HSC score of 80 in Studies, Standard and Advanced is worth exactly the same to a student’s ATAR.

A Question of Opportunity

Although Studies Exam, Standard and Advanced scale the same, the opportunities to demonstrate very high achievement in them are not equal.

It’s no good a student thinking that they’ll just take Standard, nail it and then get an incredible HSC mark more easily than they could in Advanced. I actually think the opposite is true. I suspect that, because opportunities to demonstrate very high academic achievement in Standard are not as readily available as they are in Advanced, I suspect the highest scores in Standard may be more difficult to achieve than the highest scores in Advanced.

But that does not persist down the mark range. I’ve seen quite a few tutoring companies telling students to only study Advanced and never Standard. This is terrible advice.

In general, I think Advanced is better suited to students who are capable of achieving a Band 5 or 6. I think students who are capable of achieving a Band 6 should almost always be in Advanced. But students who are really only ready to work toward Band 4, or are borderline Band 4-5, may well be better off in Standard, in a course designed to be taught for them. There’s a lot of muddy water around which English course is best for students and the people best suited to give students good advice about which course they are a best fit for are teachers who know the course, know the school and know the students.

In general, I think (and even here there’s plenty of room for exceptions)

• Students capable of a Band 6 should be in Advanced

• Students not capable of a Band 5 should usually be in Standard

• Students not capable of a mid Band 3 should usually be in Studies

But experienced, thoughtful teacher judgement should trump this.

English Studies Exam

Studies is fast growing. I only have any data on the students who sit the external exam. In Studies, whatever you’re exam mark is, that’s your HSC mark. In school assessment marks are only used if there’s an illness or misadventure.

From 1.4% of HSC students taking the Studies exam in 2019, to 3.5% in 2025, that’s fast growth, particularly from 2024 to 2025. In both 2024 and 2025, one student in Studies Exam achieved a Band 6. I don’t think that’s something to count on happening, but the box is open, so I suspect it’ll happen most years now.

Because Studies Exam is aligned to the same scale as Standard and Advanced, there are very few scores achieved above a mid Band 4.

Here’s how the bands scaled for Studies Exam in 2025. It’s identical to Standard and Advanced.

Studies will come off the common scale soon, so I hope this will change and the mark distributions are a better match to the cohort. If that happens, though, the value of higher HSC scores to ATARs will reduce significantly. Overall, I think this might be a good thing, though.

The proportion of students achieving high contributions to ATARs is very low. And that’s appropriate, I think. It’s not what the subject is for.

English Standard

There’s something I think is working with Standard at the moment. I don’t mind that there are Band 5 and 6 students in Standard, and I think the proportions we have right now across the state probably work pretty well overall. That may be wrong, but it’s how I feel right now. There’s also been a solid increase in Band 4 achievement. This isn’t just because of NESA moving the goalposts at marking time (that may have happened as well, I’m not sure). Standard, as a state cohort, is changing in its achievement.

Over the last 10 years, there’s not been much change in the ATAR achievement of the top 10% of students in Standard, but the median ATAR has increased significantly. This may suggest that quite a few lower achievers who used to take Standard are now taking Studies instead. I think this is often a good thing for those students.

Compared to other HSC subjects, achievement in Standard is skewed toward the middle and left with very few students achieving a Band 6. Apart from Studies Exam, Standard has the lowest proportion of Band 6 scores, consistently hitting around about 0.5%.

The opportunity for contributions to high ATARs in Standard exist, but they’re not realised in large numbers. Only about 10% of the state cohort achieve an ATAR contribution of 80+. That’s still a lot of students, at 3,354, but as a percentage, it’s quite low. That is, there are a lot of students who will get there, but there are no free rides and those higher marks in Standard are hard won by the students who achieve them.

English Advanced

English Advanced achievement has increased over recent years. There has been a slight increase in the ATARs of the to 10% of the cohort and a more significant increase in the achievement of the median score. This is similar to Standard. This makes sense when we see the corresponding change in band achievement in the two courses. I think, overall, we’re seeing the middle move to better courses for them overall. There’s a heap of overlap and it’s messy. But movement over the last 10 years has been happening. When more of the lower achievers in Advanced who will be the middle to high middle achievers move to Standard more often, the median for Advanced increases, the highest achievement is less affected and the median of Standard increases as well.

HSC scores in Advanced are skewed much more to the right than Standard. A far higher proportion of students achieve Band 6 scores in Advanced, and far fewer from mid Band 4 down.

Unsurprisingly, far more students in English Advanced achieve high contributions to high ATARs than in Standard. In Standard, about 10% of students achieved an ATAR contribution of 80+. In Advanced it’s just about 60% of students.

That’s not because Advanced scales better or higher, or that it’s easier to get a higher contribution to your ATAR in Advanced. It’s because more high achieving students are in Advanced than Standard in the first place.

Advanced is great for the right students who are ready and willing to do the requisite reading and writing.

English EALD

English EALD is not marked on the same scale as Studies Exam, Standard and Advanced. But it’s marked so similarly that it might as well be. I find English EALD an interesting case study that gives me more confidence in the common scale applied to the other three 2 unit English subjects.

EALD is one of the more difficult subjects for schools to analyse results over time and make meaningful value laden judgements.

EALD has had a pretty significant drop in candidature from 2007 to now. Fewer than 2% of students now take EALD from year to year.

EALD scales very similarly to the other 2 unit English subjects. I have the Band 1,2 and some 3 scores looking quite different, but I think that’s more likely my error and that scores continue looking like the other English courses throughout the marking range.

Here’s what bands were worth to student ATARs in English EALD in 2025.

The proportion of students in EALD achieving very high ATAR contributions is about what I’d expect. It’s not high or low, it just is.

English Extension 1

The proportion of students studying English Extension 1 has decreased since 2007. In 2007, 9.5% of HSC students studied Extension 1. In 2025 it was 4.8%. Over the same time the proportion of students achieving at E3 and E4 level has risen, particularly E4s, almost doubling.

In short, English E4s have gotten easier to achieve in recent years and this has caused the value of low E4 scores to decrease. It is, according to UAC, more difficult to achieve an HSC score of 90 in Standard and Advanced than it is to achieve an HSC score of 45 in Extension 1. I wrote more about this in a recent post about extension subjects.

Achievement in Extension 1 is skewed toward high E3 and E4 scores. About 42% of all students achieved an E4. That’s a lot.

English Extension 1 does provide more plentiful opportunity for high contributions to very high ATARs than the 2 unit subjects. As it should. In Standard, about 10% of students achieved an ATAR contribution of 80+. In Advanced it was 60% and in Extension 1 it’s about 80%. About 8% of students achieved a 99+ ATAR contribution.

The above chart is how Extension 1 bands scored in the HSC. 42% of the cohort achieved, by estimates, an ATAR contribution of about 93+. That’s a lot.

English Extension 1 provides ample opportunity for high achievers to have English as a positive contributor to very high ATARs.

English Extension 2

Like Extension 1, English Extension 2 has seen a decline in rates of participation. With 3.8% of NSW HSC students studying Extension 2 in 2007, dropping to 1.8% by 2025, participation is about half of what it was. It’s also seen some pretty significant change in E3 and E4 achievement, dropping until 2018, then rising again until now. In 2025, about 89% of students achieved an E3 or E4 in Extension 2.

Over the last 10 years, the top 10% of achievers in English Extension 2 have been slightly lower achieving overt time. It’s not huge, but it is noticeable and the result is that there is less very high contributions to ATARs in Extension 2 than Extension 1, which hasn’t seen the same decline.

The proportion of very high achievement in Extension 2 at 99+ is less than in Extension 1, but it’s still plenty.

The vast majority of scores achieved in Extension 2 are E3 and E4, with the most achieved score being 46/50. That’s a high mark to peak at, requiring a steep decline over the last 4 available marks.

English Extension 2 is a high scaling subject. It’s not the highest scaling at the very top, but there’s no deficit in opportunity for high and very high achievers. It’s a subject all of its own and isn’t like any other. It attracts a broad range of achievers from the Extension 1 course and, unlike Maths Extension 2, doesn’t just attract the top achievers in Extension 1.