For a lot of Year 9 and 10 students, school is an ongoing cycle of learning content and completing assessments. However, apart from getting good grades, you may be wondering - how do high school subjects and electives help me?

We’ve drawn together the top things you need to know about Year 9-10 subjects, and how the skills you learn can actually be really beneficial to you in the future.

1. Does Year 9-10 matter?

Teachers and tutors hear this question all the time. Short answer: Yes – but maybe not for the reason you think!

Years 9-10 are often referred to as the ‘bludge’ or ‘easy’ years in high school and yet they’re the training ground for your Preliminary and HSC studies. Not only that, Year 10 is often the year that you’re offered the opportunity to do work experience before choosing your HSC subjects.

Trying to figure out what you like and how you like to work can be a rollercoaster. It seems like everyone is asking you what you want to be and what your plans are. The truth is that no one really expects you to have it figured out yet.

Think about it this way - Years 9-10 is a bit like eating at a buffet. There are the things you have to eat like everyone else – English, Maths, Science and HSIE – but there are also different sides you get to try – e.g. Visual Arts, Design and Technology, Languages and Commerce.

Some food tastes good to you and gives you energy – that’s the stuff you’ll go back to for seconds. There are others which leave you feeling dissatisfied – that’s the stuff you might want to avoid.

Use this time to take note of what you like so that when you go to choose next time, you can make the best choice for you.

2. How do my subject choices affect my future?

Often, it’s the skills, rather than the content, which actually carries forward from Year 10 into your senior years and even beyond the HSC. We call these skills ‘transferable’ – skills which you can use across a wide variety of subject areas.

Subject	On the surface, it’s...	You actually learn to...	You can use these skills in...
English	Memorising quotes and writing essays	Decode deeper meaning from writing, images, video and sound Form your own opinions and interpretations of ideas Organise your ideas and express them clearly and concisely	Law Jounalism Business development Consultancy
Design and Technology	Making new things	Solve problems using both known approaches and your own creativity Manage your time and projects under stressful conditions Brainstorm and then narrow down which new ideas to pursue	Architecture Marketing Nursing Engineering UX design
Physical Activity and Sports Studies	Playing sports	Set personal goals and plan the steps to achieve them Work with others to help them improve their own abilities Understand the world around you better as you engage with social issues	Teaching Physiotherapy Project Management Psychology Business Sales

All of these skills can be applied to not only other subjects in Year 11 and 12, but also beyond high school in your study, work and everyday life.

3. How do I make the best subject choice for Year 9-10?

There is never one ‘best’ subject when it comes to Year 9-10 electives. You might be a little stressed out, with your parents or family encouraging you to do certain subjects or follow a particular pathway, or perhaps they’re leaving it up to you to choose and you’re feeling a bit lost.

Year 9-10 is a time for experimenting with your subject interests, giving you a chance to figure out what you like, how you learn and which skills you would like to build. Every student approaches it differently!

Meet Sam

Sam finds out that she’ll need to learn more about the human body and physical activity, so she chooses Physical Activity and Sports Studies (PASS) for Years 9-10.

She also wants to learn more about running a business, so she takes Commerce.

Meet Tyler

Tyler decides to take Visual Arts for Years 9-10.

His school also allows students to take a different second elective in each year – he chooses Multimedia for Year 9 and Information Software and Technology (IST) for Year 10 because he likes both the creative and technical side of computers.

Meet Max

Max has a chat with his sister who suggests that Max gives Drama a try.

He is fairly shy but he really wants to build his confidence and he used to filming short videos with his cousins as a kid.

With an avid interest in international media and culture, he also picks up Japanese.

When choosing your electives, consider the following three factors:

Your interests both inside and outside of school
Your strengths and weaknesses, including the things you might like to get better at
Any potential career pathways which sound interesting to you

4. What do I do if I hate my electives?

So what do you do when you realise that your choices were not the right ones for you?

Well, the options really depend on your school’s electives policy and the reasons why you don’t like your elective choice. Some schools will allow you to change subjects after you’ve spoken with your Year Coordinator and parents or carers.

Other schools might not allow you to switch. In this case, it’s important to think about why you dislike your electives:

Is it because of your class? Perhaps you can ask to switch to another class. Remember, sometimes it just takes time to adjust to your new class.

Is it because of the content? Maybe you’re finding your elective too hard or even boring. Remember that you will be covering a variety of topics over the course of your elective, so other topics in the subject might be more interesting to you or match your skills better.

Is it because of the workload? It’s totally normal to struggle with the heavier workload when heading into Year 9-10. Other existing priorities can also greatly influence your experience.

If you think you might grow to like your subjects, you can try to wait it out and find aspects or skills which you like.

Things to Remember

In any case, it’s best to chat to your teacher about how you’re feeling and what your options are. They are the subject experts and can help you decide if it’s right for you to continue.

At the end of the day, your Year 9-10 subject choices don't necessarily have to correlate towards concrete goals - Rather, they offer you a taste test before you have to commit. Pay attention to what you like and dislike in Years 9-10 and you will be able to figure out more about yourself, your interests and your skills.

We hope that understanding your own learning earlier will make your next subject choice, and eventually post-school pathway decision, that much easier for you.

Written by Olivia Di Costanzo

Content Coordinator | English Tutor

Liv is an experienced high school tutor with a passion for insights into contemporary topics in education. She is currently studying a Bachelor of Media & Communications at the University of Sydney.

In late 2020, the world was introduced to OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT. You may have heard students and parents alike talking about this new tool, whether with excitement or concern.

Why not hear from the chatbot itself? When we asked ChatGPT to write a self-introduction, it called itself a “groundbreaking language model that is revolutionising the way we learn and interact” as well as an “AI marvel” with “knowledge that knows no bounds”. To students, this may seem to be a miracle tool, but is that really the case?

As technology and education experts continue to debate the merits of this new artificial intelligence (AI) tool, one thing is clear: ChatGPT and generative AI are simply part of our digital learning future. Becoming comfortable with them and ensuring its proper use in school is the next step we will all need to take. To help you out, we’ve collated the key facts you need to know about ChatGPT.

Top 5 things you need to know about ChatGPT

What is ChatGPT?
How does ChatGPT work?
Where does ChatGPT get its information?
Can I use ChatGPT for school?
How to use ChatGPT properly

1. What is ChatGPT?

According to OpenAI, the creators of the technology behind it, ChatGPT is an online chatbot website built to answer any questions users enter.

It has become widely popular among students for its ability to produce responses in ‘natural language’ or the way we naturally speak and write. Unlike other chatbots, interacting with ChatGPT feels like you’re having a conversation with another person. It’s like talking to a teacher, albeit one who has access to tons of information from across the internet.

However, although the chatbot seems to be all-knowing and human-like, in reality it lacks many of the contextual, creative and critical skills we have as humans. While it can seem to write good essays or conduct sufficient research, it can’t reflect the specifics of your classroom learning nor adapt to marking trends. With these limits, it’s best for students to use it as an educational assistant rather than a magic wand.

2. How does ChatGPT work?

When you type in a ‘prompt’, ChatGPT will generate a response almost instantaneously. Prompts can be anything from a question to an instruction or simply a topic starter. You can reply to it, either by asking the chatbot to adjust the content or simply commenting on the information.

Fundamentally, the AI component is in producing the next logical response in the conversation according to dialogues it learns from online.

It can also remember past conversations you have had with it, using these prior interactions as context for its future conversations with you. This is what makes the interactions with the AI feel more authentic and human, and also make it an incredibly personalised learning tool.

3. Where does ChatGPT get its information?

To get more technical, GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This refers to the way ChatGPT was trained using ‘tokens’ which are common sequences of characters (letters, numbers and symbols) often found in text.

ChatGPT uses over 500 billion tokens to understand your questions and respond with the most appropriate answer based on the ground rules, situations and data it was trained on.

These tokens can only come from data which is written by humans, including:

Books

Articles

Open-source or freely accessible content from the internet

ChatGPT is trained using reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). This means that AI trainers rewarded the chatbot for choosing the best responses, helping to create its ‘neural network’ which is inspired by the way humans process information.

While it doesn’t copy and paste information straight from the internet, it puts it into the context of your conversation and your preferences, predicting a string of words that will come next based on the prompts that you feed it.

4. Can I use ChatGPT for school?

Each school and educational institution will have their own guidelines on whether using ChatGPT is permitted. It is important to check with your teacher or subject coordinator.

Currently, the NSW Department of Education has placed an interim ban on the use of ChatGPT on school devices due to concerns about the potential for students to be exposed to inappropriate content. However, teachers and department staff currently have access to AI tools and are set to complete an official review about the use of AI in classrooms this July.

As a general rule, copying straight from ChatGPT’s generated responses without a citation is plagiarism regardless of whether your school permits the use of chatbots.

On the other hand, ChatGPT can often be ethically used as an incredible brainstorming tool to supplement the learning process. The tool can effectively kickstart your working process and give you the inspiration you need when you hit those creative blocks, provided you use it appropriately.

Indeed, the use of ChatGPT is even permitted in the International Baccalaureate (IB) in Australia and at Catholic schools in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. According to Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools, “with greater teacher understanding and supported experimentation, governed by good policy to manage risks, AI could potentially improve teaching for stronger thinking and deeper learning”.

Many Australian universities have also begun to develop their own guidelines of academic integrity for the use of AI by students in classrooms and for assessments.

The University of Sydney has embraced the technology in selected assignments, urging that “AI will only keep improving at breakneck speed, even if the current generation of AI has limitations around factual accuracy and overconfidence”. This means that “we need to embrace it as a new tool that has the potential to transform knowledge industries” such as education.

5. How to use ChatGPT properly

ChatGPT has a myriad of uses, ranging from answering questions for research to language translation, basic calculations and explaining complex concepts in simple terms.

You may have seen people on social media experimenting with this to create movie scripts, short stories or poems. Others have even used it to create schedules for their commitments and projects, however, this must be manually transferred to your existing calendar app.

As a study tool, it can be useful for clarifying classroom concepts in a way that works best for you, as well as generating an endless supply of practice questions and scenarios or conversationally generating flashcard content to assist with revision.

The AI-powered future of high school learning

In fast-paced classrooms with jam-packed syllabi, teachers and students are searching for innovative ways to optimise the learning process. Generative AI like ChatGPT is the next step in this mission to provide more personalised and engaging education for digital native students who have grown up in this evolving technology-driven world.

Learning to use AI is a skill that students will need to develop to stay ahead of the curve, not only in high school, but beyond the HSC. However, it can be easy to fall into the trap of simply relying on ChatGPT. Fact-checking the information and advice it provides is crucial to avoid being misinformed.

With this exciting chatbot at your fingertips, now is your chance to experiment and learn how to best use this AI-powered tool to achieve your academic goals.

Want to Learn More about ChatGPT & generative AI’s impact on high school learning? Watch Webinar

Written by Liv Di Costanzo

Content Coordinator | English Tutor

‘Does Year 9-10 really matter?’ – Top questions we get asked about Year 9-10 subject selection

Top questions we get asked about Year 9-10 subject selection:

1. Does Year 9-10 matter?

2. How do my subject choices affect my future?

3. How do I make the best subject choice for Year 9-10?

4. What do I do if I hate my electives?

Things to Remember

Top 5 things you need to know about ChatGPT and how artificial intelligence is changing high school education