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Haniyah Abou-Said had an even bigger taste of life in lockdown than most Melburnians this year.
The Flemington public housing tower in which she lives with her family was put under hard and immediate lockdown while she was on school holidays in July, as the Andrews government sought to contain a dangerous COVID-19 outbreak.
Haniyah Abou-Said says her VCE result is strong enough to get her into her dream course, a bachelor of fashion and textiles.
Credit:Scott McNaughton
But as holidays bled into term three and Haniyah stayed cooped up in her family apartment all day, the year 12 student at Mount Alexander College felt confident and relaxed about her looming exams.
Advertisement They saw that success in year 12 was not just about themselves, but about community, he said. They have reaped the rewards of a breadth of experience: the highest achieving kids don t lock themselves away in a room, they work hard and they play hard and they get involved in things and they help others.
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It is the third time in the past five years that Bialik has topped the rankings. It pipped second-placed Mount Scopus â also a Jewish coeducational prep-year 12 school â by a tiny margin.
Mount Scopus principal Rabbi James Kennard said the students had shown profound resilience and determination this year.
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Year 12 student Iman Al Atassi has overcome bigger challenges than those thrown up in 2020, including fleeing Syria with her family five years ago.
Iman said this year s lockdown was crazy and challenging, from not being able to see friends or teachers face to face, to staring at screens for 12 hours a day.
Iman, 18, has just finished year 12 at St Albans College. She and her family moved to Australia in 2015 after fleeing Syria.
Credit:Scott McNaughton How did we get through it? Honestly, we just had to persevere and try our best, because it s year 12 and we have to work hard to get where we want even though everything was so disruptive, said Iman, who, like almost 65,000 other year 12 students, will get her results on Wednesday morning.
What is the ATAR?
The ATAR is the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, which is a tool designed to assist tertiary institutions when selecting students for courses. It provides an overall measure of a student’s relative performance in their VCE studies.
The ATAR is created by VTAC using the results from a student’s successful completion of the VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education), as assessed and administered by the VCAA (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority).
VCE students will receive a study score from the VCAA for each study a student completes, which reflects their relative performance in that study only. So that institutions can fairly compare students who have chosen different subject combinations, VTAC applies a process of scaling to each study score before it is used in the calculation of the ATAR.
December 23, 2020
Former exam authority official Hans Yeung says he was scapegoated over a question on 20th century Sino-Japanese relations.
South China Morning Post
A veteran employee at Hong Kong’s exam authority who stepped down last month following an outcry over a question on Sino-Japanese relations has said he was made a scapegoat and that he resigned under “political pressure”.
Speaking out in an interview with the Post more than six months after the controversy erupted, Hans Yeung Wing-yu also defended the controversial university entrance exam question, which had asked students if they agreed with the statement that Japan did “more good than harm to China” in the first half of the 20th century.