What each part means
Every subject is rated against eight things it builds, and shown with honest scaling context. Here's a plain-English legend for all of it.
The eight qualities a subject can build
Shaping ideas into clear, well-structured prose — the writing craft that carries across essays, reports and beyond.
Building a position and defending it with evidence — making a case, weighing the other side, and persuading a reader.
Breaking a problem down, spotting patterns, and reasoning from evidence to a sound conclusion.
Working confidently with numbers and mathematical models — calculation, algebra, data and quantitative reasoning.
Hands-on experimental skill — designing investigations, taking careful measurements, and reasoning about results and error.
Running your own line of inquiry — finding, judging and pulling together sources, and managing a project to a deadline.
Generating and resolving original ideas — composing, designing, performing, or making a sustained body of work.
Holding and organising a large body of detail — building a reliable mental map you can draw on under exam pressure.
Reading the scaling figures
The average scaled mark of everyone who took the subject, out of 50 per unit. It reflects how academically strong that year's cohort was — not how “hard” the subject is.
For any one HSC mark there's a range of scaled marks, so we always show a band. The width is the honest uncertainty — there's no exact HSC-to-scaled conversion.
Scaling is reported per unit. A 2-unit course mark out of 100 is two units; the scaled figure is per unit, out of 50 — the standard UAC measure.
How steady a subject's scaled mean has been across recent years. “Very stable” barely moves; “Variable” shifts more from year to year.
Most courses are 2 units; Extension courses are 1 unit and sit on top of a prerequisite. The ATAR counts your best 2 units of English plus your 8 best remaining units (10 in total).
Our honest read of the workload — roughly how many hours and how demanding week to week, not just how much content there is.
Where too few students sat a subject, UAC doesn't publish a fair distribution, so we show qualitative guidance only and no scaling band.