QCAA External Exams 2026: Dates, Weightings & What You Need

Queensland's 2026 external assessments run from Monday 26 October to Tuesday 17 November. That is the answer most people arrive looking for, and it is the least useful thing on this page. The date your exam falls on tells you when to turn up. What actually decides your subject result is the arithmetic underneath it: how many of your 100 marks are still unclaimed, and what you need out of them. This page has the full timetable, what the exam is worth in every subject, and how to work out the mark you need on yours.

When are the 2026 QCAA external exams?

External assessment for General and General (Extension) subjects runs across four weeks in Term 4.

Two things about that window catch students out every year. The first is that it is not a solid block — the exams are spread over four weeks, and most subjects sit in the first three. The second is that the timetable fixes the day and the session, not the hour. QCAA sets whether your exam is a morning or an afternoon paper; your school decides the start time inside a window that opens fifteen minutes before the scheduled start and closes fifteen minutes after it. The timetable your school hands you is the one to plan your morning around.

The 2026 external assessment timetable

Every General and General (Extension) external assessment, with its date, session, length and what it is worth. Search for your subject, or star the ones you take to build your own run of exam dates.

A few subjects sit two papers. Every science and every maths subject splits its exam across a Paper 1 and a Paper 2, close together but not always on the same day. Chemistry sits both papers on Friday 30 October, morning and afternoon. General Mathematics sits Paper 1 on Thursday 5 November in the afternoon and Paper 2 the next morning. Either way, the two papers together produce one external assessment result.

Applied subjects and Short Courses do not appear here, because they are not externally assessed at all. Senior External Examinations are a separate pathway on their own timetable.

How much is your external assessment worth?

A General subject result is a mark out of 100 built from four instruments: three internal assessments your school sets and marks, and one external assessment QCAA sets and marks. The external share is not the same in every subject, and the difference is large.

• Most General subjects25 marks
• Sciences and mathematics50 marks

English, Legal Studies, Business, Visual Art, Modern History and most other General subjects put 25 of the 100 marks on the external exam, leaving 75 with your internal assessment. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Psychology, Earth & Environmental Science, Marine Science, Agricultural Science, General Mathematics, Mathematical Methods and Specialist Mathematics put 50 there. In those ten subjects, the exam is worth as much as all three internal tasks combined.

If you want the full picture of how the four instruments combine, how your QCAA subject result is built works through it subject by subject.

What mark do you need on your external assessment?

The calculation is one subtraction. Take the subject result you are aiming at, subtract every internal mark you have actually been given, and what is left is what the exam has to deliver.

1. Write down your target

   A number out of 100. If you are working backwards from an ATAR, pick the subject result you need rather than a vague band.

2. Add up the marks you have banked

   Only marks your teacher has actually returned. A task you have handed in but not had back is not a mark yet, and a task you expect to do well on is a hope, not a number.

3. Subtract

   Target minus banked marks is the contribution the external assessment has to make, expressed in marks out of 100 — which is the same scale the EA is reported on.

Three subjects, three very different answers.

English, aiming at 80

English splits evenly: IA1, IA2, IA3 and the EA are 25 marks each. Say the three internal tasks came back at 19, 21 and 20 — that is 60 banked. To reach 80 the exam has to contribute 20 of its 25 marks. Demanding, but the exam is only a quarter of the subject, so the internal marks have already done most of the work.

Biology, aiming at 85

Biology is 10 for the data test, 20 for the student experiment, 20 for the research investigation and 50 for the exam. Suppose those three came back at 7, 16 and 17 — 40 banked out of a possible 50. Reaching 85 means the exam has to return 45 of 50. The same internal performance that leaves an English student needing a solid exam leaves a Biology student needing an excellent one, because half the subject is still unmarked.

Mathematical Methods, aiming at 90

Methods is 20 for the problem-solving and modelling task, 15 and 15 for the two internal exams, and 50 for the external. Marks of 17, 12 and 13 give 42 banked. A 90 now needs 48 out of 50 across both papers. It is still possible — but it is worth knowing that before November, not after.

Calculate yours

Doing this by hand for six subjects is where most people give up. The calculator holds every General subject's instrument structure, so you enter the marks you have and it tells you what the exam has to be.

It separates marks you have been given from marks you are predicting, which matters more than it sounds: a plan built on three optimistic guesses is a plan built on nothing. Feed the subject results into the ATAR calculator to see where the whole set lands.

What if the mark you need is impossible?

Sometimes the subtraction returns a number larger than the exam is worth. If you have banked 40 in Biology and you want 95, the exam would have to return 55 out of 50. That target is gone, and no amount of study recovers it.

This is worth finding out deliberately rather than discovering it in December. Two numbers help.

• Your maximum achievable result: banked marks plus full marks on everything still outstanding. In the Methods example above that is 42 + 50 = 92, so a 95 was never available.
• Your realistic result: banked marks plus an exam mark in line with what you have actually scored on similar tasks. That is the number to plan around.

A ceiling of 92 in one subject is not a disaster. An ATAR is calculated by QTAC from your best five scaled subject results, so a capped result in one subject can be carried by the others — and knowing which subject has room to move tells you where the next four weeks of study should go. How the Queensland ATAR is calculated explains what scaling does to a subject result on the way through.

How to prepare for the external assessment

The external exam is set against the same syllabus objectives your internal assessment was, and marked against a published marking guide. Preparation is less about volume than about matching the thing you are being marked on.

• Sit the past papers under time. QCAA publishes previous external assessment papers and marking guides for every subject. A paper attempted with the clock running teaches you something a paper read through does not.
• Work from the syllabus objectives. The exam samples the Unit 3 and 4 objectives. A list of those objectives is a more honest revision checklist than a list of topics.
• Learn what the cognitive verbs demand. A question asking you to evaluate wants something structurally different from one asking you to describe, and the marks follow the difference. Our list of all 117 QCAA cognitive verbs gives the official definition of each.
• Budget the planning time. The timetable prints it separately for a reason — you cannot write during it. Two hours plus fifteen minutes means fifteen minutes to read, plan and choose, then two hours to write.
• Rehearse the conditions, not just the content. Handwriting for two hours is a physical skill, and one that most Year 12 students have not practised since their last internal exam.

If you have an internal assessment still to hand in before the exam block, moving that draft up a mark band is usually a cheaper way to buy marks than the same hours spent on exam revision — a banked internal mark is certain in a way an exam mark is not.

What happens after the exams

Your papers leave the school and are marked by QCAA-appointed markers, not by your teachers, against a marking guide written for that paper. Marking is anonymous and centrally moderated.

1. 17 November

   The last external assessment is sat. Marking begins.

2. 16 December

   Subject results and your Senior Education Profile are released from 9:00 am through the QCAA student portal. Each subject comes back as a mark out of 100 and an A–E grade.

3. 18 December

   QTAC releases ATARs from 9:00 am, calculated from your best five scaled subject results.

One thing the exam cannot do is change your internal marks. Your school's provisional internal marks are confirmed by QCAA through a separate quality-assurance process that finishes before results are released, and a confirmed internal mark can differ from the one your teacher wrote on the task. That is the system working as designed. The external assessment is added to those confirmed marks — it never reaches back and alters them.