If you’re undertaking your VCE, you will have probably noticed that a portion of your assessment in Year 12 is made up of SACs. SAC stands for ‘school assessed coursework,’ and ultimately, the marks you get in them will contribute to your study score.

If you’re confused about how SACs work, read on!

The number and type of SACs that you have depend on the subject you’re doing. They may be a simple test, take home assignment, presentation, report, folio etc. For each subject, SACs have a slightly different weighting, and you can find that out by consulting the relevant study design.  

Here are the SACs undertaken in VCE Chemistry Unit 3 – there’s one for each outcome. Each SAC is weighted the same, and this requirement will be followed by all schools.

As you can see, the last column gives some options for the type of SAC that can be done to assess the corresponding outcome. Your teacher will choose which type of SAC you will do. This will depend on the resources they have available, their personal preference, the outcome being assessed or student interest.  

The most important thing that you should know is that SACs are set by your teachers. That’s right, every single school will have different SACs!  

You’re probably wondering how that’s fair. If every teacher has the freedom to write their own SACs, wouldn’t they try and make them easy so their students can do better? Perhaps you have a friend at a school that is notorious for setting difficult SACs. Or maybe you feel like you’ll do much better in a research investigation than an in class test.

Understanding the Ranking System

Ultimately, the difficulty level of your SACs does not matter, as your final SAC mark will be determined through a complicated statistical moderating process done by VCAA. It depends on your rank, which is where your SAC marks sit within your cohort, as well as your cohort’s overall exam performance in that subject.  

No one knows exactly how they do it, but the process is a bit like this:

Let’s say we have a cohort of 3 students, and each of them receive the following overall marks for their SACs across Units 3 and 4:

Student A: 85% (Rank 1)

Student B: 71% (Rank 2)

Student C: 62% (Rank 3)

They then receive the following marks for their final exam:

Student A: 76% (Rank 2)

Student B: 80% (Rank 1)

Student C: 68% (Rank 3)

Since Student A performed the best on the SACs, they will get the highest exam mark (Student B’s) as their SAC mark. Student B will get the next best, while Student C will get the lowest. Therefore, their final SAC marks will be as follows:

Student A: 80%

Student B: 76%

Student C: 68%

As you can see, Student A’s SAC mark became lower, while Student B’s and C’s both went up. This is reflective on how well each student did on their exams.  

If a cohort all performed strongly on their SACs, but performed poorly on the exam, their SAC scores will scale down. This is because VCAA will assume that they had easy SACs. The same goes vice versa. This is why exam performance really matters!

Ultimately, having a good ranking within your cohort is what’s important. You’re all sitting the same SAC, so the better you do compared to them, the better the SAC mark you will receive. This doesn’t mean you should sabotage your friends! You should all be working together to perform well on the final exam, since the scores you receive there will affect your final SAC mark.

There’s pros and cons to easy SACs, so don’t feel like your teacher is trying to ruin your mark if they’re setting quite difficult ones. Easy SACs may help boost your confidence, but difficult ones will set you up better for the final exam. It will all even out in the end.

Hopefully this article helped you understand a bit about what SACs are - just don’t let it overwhelm you. You should just aim to do the best that you can, and focus on your final exams, as that is what will help you in the end.