The key change for Assessing Writing in Australia in 2024 is that the Year 2 tasks will be handwritten, while years 4, 6, 8 and 10 are all to be typed using individual logins to the website.
For each Year group there will be two tasks during the academic year: one in Term 1 and one in Term 3.
We will release the tasks before the writing window starts (go to the task and the Download national assessment documents link to access them).
To see the release and upload dates, check the calendar here. We will also email you when the task is available.
Conditions
When you judge the task, 80% of the judgements you do will involve comparisons of your students. The other 20% will involve comparisons of writing from students from other schools.* This means that in order for the comparisons to be fair, students in different schools have to complete the work under the same conditions.
Therefore, please ensure students complete the work in independent conditions with no use of sentence starters, success criteria, exercise books or other external aids.
The task will be available for download as a PDF document. Display the PDF at the front of the class and/or print off copies of the PDF to give to each student.
Each task will also come with a PDF document with specific teacher instructions for that task. Please do not edit the tasks in any way or give students any extra resources. The reason we have introduced these independent conditions is to ensure fairness and consistency between schools. Assessing Writing in Australia is not a high-stakes assessment. Adhering to these conditions will give you the most accurate and helpful information possible.
Writing in pen or pencil for Year 2?
Please make sure students write in pen. This helps the readability of the writing when the papers are scanned and uploaded for the judging.
To maintain the reliability of the judging, if scans are too faint to be read, unfortunately they will not be included for judging.
Students who usually type in Year 2
If students can’t handwrite their answers, then they can use the online login to submit a typed answer.