E10 - Choice & Elective Data: Setting up to meet South Australian SACE requirements

Modified on Thu, 14 Aug at 12:52 AM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preamble
Compulsory Full Year Subjects
Optional Full Year Subjects
Semester or Full Year Subject with Pre-requisite Semester 1 subject
Full Year or Semester Subject
Semester Only subjects

Preamble

The South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) is a secondary school qualification.

In South Australia, SACE requirements allow students to select a range of semester or full year subjects, with English being the only mandated full year subject. This influences how Subject Selection forms for Choice are set up. This document will explain some options for setting up Elective Data depending on school requirements.

To achieve the SACE, students must obtain at least 200 credits. Each semester subject is worth 10 credits, while full year subjects are 20 credits. There are 50 compulsory credits for SACE completion. These are 10 Numeracy credits, 20 Literacy credits, 10 credits for Stage 1 Exploring Identities & Futures (often done in Year 10) and 10 credits for the Stage 2 Activating Identities & Futures (offered in either Year 11 or 12).

Students then complete 90 credits of Stage 1(Year 11) or Stage 2(Year 12) subjects and at least 60 credits of Stage 2 subjects. (Must do 90 credits at Stage 2 for an ATAR.)

Most schools do around 120 Stage 1 Credits (Year 11 subjects) and 80 Stage 2 Credits from Year 12 subjects, although this can vary depending on VET offerings and internal arrangements.

In Year 11 the majority of students will select a combination of semesterised subjects

Compulsory Full Year Subjects

A subject, such as English, is compulsory and studied for a full year. This can be set up as a full year 2U subject.

However, it may not be imperative that the class lists remain the same across the semesters. This also allows the 2 semesters to run on different lines and may improve the line results. In this arrangement the subject can be set up as two semester courses with a corequisite rule both ways to ensure that if one semester is selected the other must be. The semester is defined for English A & B, and a rule forcing the student to select 20 credits (2U) of English subjects (E) is placed in the Rules table. No more than 2E prevents students from selecting more than 20 credits of Literacy subjects.

If using Choice to collect student preferences, the field drop downs may be defined to only show the relevant options. The 'Group' column filters to only show courses with the 'E' rule and the 'Rotation' column filters further to the semester option.

Optional Full Year Subjects

A subject must be studied (or is preferred to be studied) as a full year subject, mainly as a pre-requisite for Year 12. Examples are Languages or Chemistry. These may be set up as either a full year (2U) course or as two Semester (1U) courses. If set up as two 1U semesterised courses, a corequisite for each must be added to enforce selection. In this situation A must be taken before B so, if set up as 2 1U subjects, they should have semesters defined.

Note: Be aware with setting up as 2U, students have to leave a selection field empty when using Choice. However, the unit count will be correct when the required number of subjects are chosen.

Advantages of setting up as 2U:

It can be easily linked to a full year, Year 12 class
The same class list is retained across the semesters if there are multiple classes
Staffing is consistent for the year

Disadvantage of setting up as 2U:

Students may have less flexibility and opportunity to receive their other semester options due to a full line taken up with the one subject (same line)
Staffing must be carefully checked to ensure loading is consistent across semesters
If a student decides to move out of the subject in second semester, there may be less flexibility in choices

No rules or constraints are necessary in this scenario as the Coreq rule will be taken into consideration in the student selection process to ensure students select both the A & B option.

Semester or Full Year Subject with Pre-requisite Semester 1 subject

A subject may be studied for a semester or a full year but one course must be studied before the other, such as most Year 11 Mathematics subjects. (One semester is compulsory for most students). This is generally set up as two courses, one for each semester with a co-requisite enforcing that if Semester 2 is selected, Semester 1 must also be selected. This would allow students to only study the Semester 1 option.

Rules would be added for the Mathematics subjects to ensure at least 1U of Maths is selected.

Full Year or Semester Subject

A subject may be studied for a semester or a full year.

If the semester course content is differentiated, such as Biology A where the course is 'Cells and Microorganisms' and Biology B where the course is 'Biodiversity and Ecosystems', and requires different course codes for each semester.

We would expect a student would select the subject based on the course content, and each semester is worth 10 credits (1U). If a student wishes to study both semesters they will select both options to complete 20 credits (2U) but there is no requirement for them to do so.

It does not generally matter in which semester each course is undertaken. However, for staffing consistency and student choice, it may preferable that there is one each semester. (This can be resolved after student selections are completed when the number of classes are being determined prior to line generation).

To set this up the semester options are treated as separate courses requiring unique course codes. (To differentiate different semester courses these could be referred to as 1 and 2 or even be given different titles: See Biology example below).

To ensure a student does not have both courses in the same semester you can either set the semester, placing 1 in Semester 1 and 2 in Semester 2 by using ‘a’ and ‘b’ in the lines column, use a rule 'Units per rot at most' 1, or once selections are finished HLink the 2 courses, to ensure consistent staffing (if there is one class of each course).

Alternatively, if the course content is not differentiated each semester and students selecting a semester option can be merged with the full year class in either semester.

This scenario requires 3 selection options; a semester option and two full year options, one for each semester. The full year option has co-requisites which force the selection of both, and has the semester specified.

It is also advised to add Rules, preventing students from selecting both the full year options as well as the semester option, as this will in effect ‘waste’ one of their choices. Putting the rule in “no more than 2 G” prevents this.

When generating lines the semester course is split into two classes and each class is linked to a semester of the full year course, and 'none' must be placed in the Tchr and Rm Pref columns for the semester classes so as not to duplicate resources.

These links are set up in the Class Constraints table.

Semester Only subjects

A subject is only available as a semester option and no full year option is available to students. This is set up as an individual subject for 1U. Any number of classes can be run and they could occur in any semester.

If you do need to dictate the semester, this is achieved by entering an 'a' or a 'b' in the lines column, or for multiple classes use a rule 'units per rot at most', after placing an identifying letter in the Rules column.