Assessment matters: - What can we understand about the National Senior Certificate results during

The sample in the table is restricted to applicants with complete APS, AL, and QL results.9 Generally, our 2021 NSC group shows similar trends in student performance on the NBT benchmarks when compared to the national cohort of students who wrote NBTs for 2022 admission (see The National Benchmark Tests Project, 2023).10 The majority of applicants attended quintile 5 schools, or schools without a. [...] The data in Figure 2 do not suggest that applicants’ AL preparedness shifted drastically over the four years, although average AL in the top quartiles11 of the performance distribution (3 and 4) does drop for the 2022 group. [...] Average QL performance, on the other hand, shows a more noticeable decline for those in quartile 2 of the 2021 distribution, and particularly at the top end of the distribution for the 2022 group. [...] Figure 3, on the other hand, shows that average APS for 2021 and 2022 consistently surpasses the closely aligned averages of the 2018 and 2019 groups across the distribution of AL and QL scores. [...] This includes the substantial change in the gradient of average APS, particularly apparent for the 2021 group at the higher end of the AL score distribution.