Top Achiever trends in NSW HSC throughout 2010–2019 — a dashboard
As high school students across NSW begin one of the most stressful period of their high school lives — the higher school certificate exams, what can we find by looking at historical Top Achiever results?
Introduction
With so much education data made publicly available by the NSW Government, I asked some teachers (i.e. brother-in-law and sister) what insights they would be interested in extracting from the data.
One topic was understanding the trends in subjects, gender and schools of Top Achievers.
Each year, after the HSC, the NSW Education Standards Authority publishes a list of Top Achievers — these are ‘student(s) who achieved one of the highest places in an HSC course or VET exam and also achieved a result in the highest band possible …’.
For a course candidature of :
- 10,000 there are 20 Top Achievers;
- 1001–10,000 there are 10 Top Achievers
- <1000 there are 5 Top Achievers
There’s a rich dataset on Top Achievers publicly available — I gathered this, combined it with other data on schools and created a dashboard which you can explore here.
Before you read on:
- Top Achievers is not the standard way to measure a school’s performance in the HSC — typically, performance is based on the number of Distinguished Achievers i.e. those who achieved the top band (determined by the top percentile)
- And of course, the number of Top Achievers a school ‘produces’ is a narrow measurement and should not be used to determine how good (or bad) a school is!
Data Source
I combined school and Top Achiever data from the following sources:
- Top Achiever results from 2010–2019
- Non-government and government school data
And then to obtain the gender for each Top Achiever (as gender was not identified in this data), I first assigned gender automatically for Top Achievers from single sex schools and then fuzzy matched the remaining names with a gender and name database I created from the All Rounders data (which did have gender). This is not perfect (especially for non-Western names), but it gets the gender mostly right.
Dashboard and Insights
The resulting dashboard created can be accessed here.
Below is a summary of the different dashboard views and what I think is interesting about them.
Top Achiever Profile by Subject
Displays the Top Achiever profile by subject in terms of:
- School and school type (gender, sector)
- Gender
If you want to select multiple subjects e.g. all the ‘English’ subjects and see it on a similar map — you can do this in Distribution of Top Achievers Across NSW.
Why I find this interesting:
- Indicates the ‘strengths’ of different schools for different subjects
- Reveals some linkages between subject and demographics — if you choose ‘Vietnamese Continuers’ you will see that the Top Achievers are from schools in the West, which is known to have a larger Vietnamese population
Top Achiever Results by School
More interesting if you have been through the NSW education system !
Displays the Top Achievers from each school throughout the years broken down by subjects.
For me, because I am familiar with these schools, it’s interesting to see:
- How the number of Top Achievers from each school has changed over time
- The common Top Achiever subjects for the school (an indicator for the ‘strength’ of the school)
Gender Ratios of Top Achievers by Subject
I have found this the most interesting. Comparing 2010 and 2019, the top subjects for males have become less maths/science heavy and more similar to those of females.
There continues to be no science subjects, though, in the top 10 for females in 2019 which is unsurprising given the under-representation of females in STEM subjects that still exist today.
What next?
Firstly, as a better measure of a school’s strength in a certain subject, using the number of Distinguished Achievers (those who achieved the top band in their subject) would be more appropriate. This data is readily available so I might extend to dashboard to capture this data later.
Secondly, demographics and non-education factors may be as or more important than a school’s ‘strength’ in a subject. As shown above, schools in the west (larger Vietnamese population) ‘produce’ the most Top Achievers for ‘Vietnamese Continuers’. What about other factors like income? Are some subjects associated with areas of higher income? Adding in a demographic lens and seeing if there are any significant correlations with subjects, I think, would be quite interesting!
