More means worse, again: what the Year 12 exams reveal. (Education).

FROM EARLY September to mid-January Australian newspapers cultivate their annual bout of examination fever. The infection is incubated by the Year 12 examinations. The various tests held in primary and lower secondary schools produce only a mild contagion, but the exams at the end of Year 12 are more virulent. They are more newsworthy because they guard access to universities and because they provide one of the few semi-objective measures of student achievement currently available, a potential they retain despite an internal, school-assessed component contributing something like 50 per cent of a candidate's final grade.

Three other reasons for media fascination with these examinations are that they measure shifts in enrolments between different subjects and between different school systems; that the content of some subjects is controversial; and that the high proportion of students now staying to Year 12 generates social, political and, indeed, economic consequences. Nowadays examinations sell newspapers. Fifty years ago this was not so.

The season starts in September, with newspapers warning students of their approaching ordeal, coupling this with hints on reducing exam nerves. More ambitious papers provide an "HSC Survival Guide", offering well-intentioned advice of limited value on the major subjects. In October the progress of the exam is marked by a daily post-mortem, consisting mainly of comments from students or teachers.

Publication of the results in December provides the occasion for an elaborate coronial inquiry. The results are analysed to decide which students and schools have done best. This happy news is studded with individual or group photos, and interviews with successful students who habitually express great surprise at how well they have done. However, as the Daily Telegraph discovered some years ago, it is unwise to identify poor performance by a particular school, especially if this is coupled with a photo of the school's examination class.

City schools are compared with country ones and, within the city, schools are compared suburb against suburb. The prolonged drift in enrolments from government to Catholic and independent schools ensures comparisons between the different school systems. Contrasting the performance of girls and boys adds extra bite to the analysis. Are boys the disadvantaged sex nowadays? Are single-sex schools "better" than co-educational? Do selective state schools perform better than nonselective, and why? Occasionally, and very discreetly, the results are perused to discover whether certain ethnic students do better than those of Anglo-Celtic provenance.

Old theories and controversies are refurbished in special articles and editorials. Teachers or former teachers write letters to the editor refuting arguments or clarifying problems. Other readers simply grit their teeth.

The education journalists do in fact provide flashes of insight, if only because they consult a wide range of people--cabinet ministers, departmental bureaucrats, academic educationists, school principals, teachers, business people. It is a sad reflection on contemporary universities that academics contribute little to the discussion.