the HSC

Year 12 2007

The NSW Higher School Certificate

Congratulations

The College congratulates all the boys of the class of 2007 and their teachers and parents on their fine academic performance.

Speech given by Daniel Yardley (ON02) at the Academic Excellence Assembly, 22 February 2008

Newington Boys in the 2007 HSC

We are proud to announce our nine recipients of the NSW Premier's Award for All-Round Excellence in the 2007 HSC (in alphabetical order):

• Eric Barnes	• Robert Morrison
• Matthew Bryan	• Vishaal Sharma
• Alexander Fleming	• Walid Yassine
• David Gillies	• Andy Zhang
• Andrew Johnston

The NSW Premier's Award is presented to students who receive 90% or more in 10 units or more.

Top Achievers:

Further congratulations must be given to the following boys for their place in the 'Best in Subject' list. In subjects with smaller numbers of candidates, the first five places are listed. In subjects with larger candidatures, up to 20 students are ranked.

• Vishaal Sharma - finished 2nd in History Extension (out of total candidature of 2,162), 7th in Economics (out of a total candidature of 5,716), 9th in English Extension 1 (out of a total candidature of 6,166) and equal 15th in English Advanced (out of a total of 28,115 candidates)

• Dimitri Kalis - finished equal 19th in Ancient History out of 11,401 candidates

• Andrew Johnston - finished 20th in Business Studies out of 15,841 candidates

In total, Newington gained 194 listings in the 'Distinguished Achievers' list – students who received a mark of 90 or above in a subject.

Distinguished Achievers

The 'Distinguished Achievers' list is made up of students that received a mark of 90 or above in a subject. Newington gained 215 listings in total (21 more than 2006 despite having a smaller cohort).

English

English is the only mandatory subject in the NSW HSC and thus results in this subject are always heavily scrutinised. This year the Sydney Morning Herald ranked the English results from Newington College as the best of any non-selective boys’ school in NSW. We must extend our congratulations to all members of the English Department and all the boys in Year 12 on this tremendous result.

In 2007, 97 boys studied the Advanced course, 54 boys studied the Standard course and 14 boys completed the ESL course.

Advanced course - 19.58% of boys achieved Band 6 in comparison to a statewide figure of 9.18%.

Standard course - 11.11% of boys finished in the top two bands, compared with 3.39% across the state.

ESL results were equally impressive with the percentage of boys achieving Band 6 over three times the figure achieved statewide.

The results in the extension subjects were exemplary:

English Extension 1 - 65.21% of boys achieved the top band in comparison to 21.99% across the state.

English Extension 2 - 70% of boys achieved the top band level in comparison to a statewide figure of 32.13%. Dimitri Kalis achieved the perfect score of 50/50 and had his major work nominated for inclusion in Exemplar, the publication of outstanding works.

Mathematics

Based on the Sydney Morning Herald figures, Newington College was the best performing non-selective GPS school in Mathematics.

General Mathematics - Following on from the outstanding results last year, the percentage of boys achieving Band 6 this year was again double the statewide figure.

Mathematics - 31.11% of boys achieved Band 6 in comparison to 15.4% across the state. Of special note here is the performance of the Year 10 class that compacted the preliminary and HSC courses into a single year. Five boys in the ‘10X’ class achieved a mark above 90. Congratulations must go to all boys in that class for completing an HSC subject two years ahead of their cohort and special thanks to Mr Rob Tredinnick for guiding the boys through this demanding course.

The results in the extension subjects were also impressive.

Mathematics Extension 1 - the percentage of boys achieving the top band was more than 10% above the statewide figure.

Mathematics Extension 2 - the percentage of boys achieving the top two bands was more than 12% above the figure achieved statewide.

TVET

The TVET subjects remained popular in 2007 with a number of boys attending TAFE. The Accounting results were outstanding with 100% of boys achieving Band 6 in comparison to 13.76% across the state. In addition Geoffrey Tanner and James Promnitz were recipients of a 2007 Australian Vocational Student Prize awarded by the Federal Government.