BOS:About
| BikiCrumbs: About |
From Biki
Note:
All Information on this page has been copied directly from the Bored of Studies Wikipedia page.
Bored of Studies is an Australian forum-style website that hosts study notes to help students in their NSW HSC and Victorian VCE exams. Many of the notes are free, though premium notes require a subscription. The site's name is a parody of the NSW Board of Studies, the governing organisation for the HSC. Additional features of the Bored of Studies website include an extensive forum and a Student Assessment Modeller (often used as an approximate UAI calculator as it allows students to input estimated marks which are then combined into a prospective UAI).
Contents |
History
The website was created on March 5th of 2002 by four former HSC students who had completed their HSC in the previous year. Regarded as the successor to the highly popular "hscboardz" and "uniboardz", the site's founders claim that because they were the first to sit a newly revised HSC syllabus, they were able to clearly see the lack of information that future HSC students would face. A desire to help address this lack of information was a prime reason behind the founding of Bored of Studies.
Influence and Criticism
Bored of Studies is becoming increasingly influential both in the New South Wales education system and to a lesser degree in the media; it is not uncommon for teachers in New South Wales to reference Bored of Studies, both as a resource and as a warning against plagiarism (see below). It has been suggested that an official bulletin from the NSW "Board of Studies" warning they were not "Bored of Studies" did much to popularise the site around the state.
There has often been criticism from teachers that Bored of Studies leads to cheating among students due to the extensive subject notes available on the site. As a result, it is known that some teachers often visit the website to check whether student assignment submissions are genuine. However, many teachers continue to view Bored of Studies as a good opportunity for HSC/VCE students to consolidate their knowledge of the material covered in school.
Bored of Studies' Student Assessment Modeller has also come under fire, particularly from the Board of Studies. The Modeller allows students to input marks and receive a result estimation. It bases these estimations on the results of past HSC cohorts. However, the HSC marking process gives slightly different results each year as it is in part reliant on how well students do in comparison to each other, a comparison that can vary strongly based on the subject profiles of students. The Assessment Modeller also requires the use of so-called "aligned marks", marks which have been adjusted into bands by the Board of Studies. Unfortunately, as aligned marks are not available to students, this requires some guesswork on the part of students, and estimates can be anywhere from less than 1% off to more than 20% depending on what marks are used by students.
Recent developments
Recently launched by Bored of Studies is the Biki (Bored of Studies Wiki), a wiki collection of HSC notes, information and resources using the MediaWiki software to allow contributions.
Bored of Studies has recently introduced 'Premium' subscription content.
External links
