New moderation methods of higher school certificate assessments: a case study of the New South Wales practice

The Higher School Certificate (HSC) is the credential awarded to secondary school students in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This paper reviews the current moderation process of the HSC and introduces and compares a range of modern statistical methods. With a comprehensive analysis of the complete 2013–2016 HSC results, we show that the monotone spline regression with the Huber loss function consistently beats the existing moderation method. With its simple structure, fast execution and improved effectiveness, this new moderation model is an ideal replacement of the in-force quadratic for the HSC practice in NSW.