One question. Are depth studies a pain in the ass, Im in Yr 10 and I've heard nothing but mostly bad things about the new syllabus
It might be a tough transition for students in the first year or two that are doing the HSC due to reduced amount of resources and from what I see in my tutoring from students is it seems like there quite a lot of teachers that are not fully equipped to deal with the new syllabus, in that they don't fully understand or know how to convey the info for the new syllabus, but that will gradually improve. However, this new syllabus for physics and chemistry is the best thing that has happened for science education in NSW for like last 15 years in my opinion. The new syllabus moves more towards actual chemistry and physics rather than what the old syllabus did in terms of lots of society and environment questions that honestly when I did the old syllabus were some of the worst sections because they were so boring and you just felt like you were memorising random history and society stuff just for the sake of the exam. Sure it is important and cool to know the context behind the discoveries in terms of an overall understanding but it really detracted away from what science actually is; applying those theories to problems and building an intuition behind the theories. The new syllabus shifts more towards this in both the physics and chemistry syllabuses, where the content you do in year 11 and 12, will actually better reflect the building blocks you need for university science. Of course because of this it is more challenging but its for the better in my opinion. Although, it's not perfect because the maths per say in these subjects isn't the level of what you might encounter at uni in physics mostly because you use calculus for physics there, but the fundamental concepts are covered to a better standard. So maybe for a few years students might be resistant to this but in the long run I expect that the standard of science students entering uni from NSW will actually improve, because many of the topics they cover in first 2 semesters of uni are taught but at a simplified level (this is good because it exposes the students to the future content if they were to do these subjects at uni), so they will have a better base, from which when they go into the more complicated analysis of what they covered it becomes easier to understand
In terms of the depth study thing it isn't really that much of a different thing to what people had to do in the previous syllabus its just now that they actually called it that. Before we used have like research tasks and practical exams as well, but they weren't really called depth studies, so in that sense its not that different for that part of the syllabus
