Every senior certificate in Australia draws the same line in the end: your teacher may tell you what is not working, and may not fix it for you. What changes at the border is how many drafts you get, whether anyone wrote the rule down, and who is holding the pen when it goes wrong. Queensland is the only jurisdiction that puts a number on your drafts. Victoria and South Australia are the only two that state in plain words what a teacher's pen may not do. In the other five, the rule that governs your draft is not the certificate authority's at all — it is your school's, and it is usually printed on the task sheet you were handed in week one.
This guide covers what your teacher is allowed to give you on a draft in each state and territory: the document that actually governs it, how many drafts you are entitled to, the wording that permits advice, the wording that forbids amendment, and what happens when a final submission does not resemble the draft. It closes with how to ask for feedback that is both useful and allowed, and what to do if your teacher has already gone too far.
The one line every state draws
Read the seven rulebooks side by side and the same principle appears in seven different vocabularies. The work submitted has to be yours. Everything else follows from that, including the parts about your teacher.
What makes the comparison confusing is that the authorities regulate two different things and students tend to hear only one of them. Some regulate the teacher's conduct — what a teacher may say, write or change. Others regulate the authenticity outcome — whether the finished work can still be called yours, leaving the conduct question to the school. Queensland, Victoria and South Australia do the first. New South Wales, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT mostly do the second.
That difference matters to you in one practical way. Where the rule is about conduct, you can point at a sentence. Where the rule is about the outcome, there is no sentence to point at, and the answer to “is my teacher allowed to do that?” is genuinely “what does your school's assessment policy say?”
What your teacher may and may not do
Strip out the jurisdictional wording and the boundary sits in a consistent place. The teacher works on your understanding; you work on the document.
Allowed in every jurisdiction
- Telling you a section does not answer the question
- Asking questions that make you notice a problem yourself
- Pointing out that a criterion is under-evidenced
- Advising on structure and sequence at a general level
- Saying your response is over or under length
- Directing your attention to errors of referencing or accuracy
- Suggesting you investigate a concept further
Not allowed anywhere
- Rewriting your sentences or paragraphs
- Correcting errors for you rather than flagging them
- Dictating the specific changes to make
- Writing any part of the response themselves
- Supplying a sample answer for you to adapt
- Editing to the point that authorship is in doubt
The distinction is easiest to hold onto as a test of who did the thinking. If the teacher's comment leaves you with a problem to solve, it is feedback. If it leaves you with a change to transcribe, it has crossed over. South Australia puts that test into a single sentence: the focus of teacher assistance “should be on informing the student rather than on amending the draft”.
If the language your teacher is using on the draft is unfamiliar, how to read an ISMG explains how criterion descriptors work, and formative versus summative feedback covers why a draft comment and a result comment are doing different jobs.
How many drafts do you actually get?
This is the question students ask most and the one where the folklore is furthest from the documents. The widely repeated “you only get one draft” is a Queensland rule. It is not a national one.
| Jurisdiction | Authority | Drafts the authority allows |
|---|---|---|
| Queensland | QCAA | One complete or near-complete draft, in the syllabus mode. A stated rule. |
| New South Wales | NESA | No limit set. School decides and must publish the extent of assistance permitted. |
| Victoria | VCAA | No limit set. Teachers are “not required to formally sight drafts” for coursework at all. |
| South Australia | SACE Board | No board-wide limit. “One draft” appears in some subject-level advice. |
| Northern Territory | SACE Board / NTBOS | As South Australia — NTCET students study SACE subjects under SACE assessment policy. |
| Western Australia | SCSA | No limit, and no rule about drafts at all. Entirely a school matter. |
| Tasmania | TASC | No limit. From 2026 schools also set their own internal folio deadlines. |
| ACT | BSSS | No limit. Any draft policy must be printed on the task coversheet. |
Six of the eight leave the number to your school. That is not a loophole to exploit — it means the document that decides your entitlement is the school assessment policy and the conditions section of your task sheet, and that two schools sitting the same course can legitimately offer different amounts of help.
Queensland: the QCAA
Queensland has the most prescriptive drafting rule in the country and, at the same time, a thinner prohibition than most students imagine. Section 8.2.5 of the QCE and QCIA policy and procedures handbook, version 7.0, is where drafting lives.
On the number, the handbook is unambiguous: “Teachers provide feedback on one complete or near-complete draft, which must be in the mode required by the syllabus.” The mode clause has teeth. For a spoken task the draft must be spoken — the handbook specifies “a spoken response rather than a draft of a written speech”, and adds that “a draft rendered by text-to-speech software is not appropriate, as the student's voice is to be recorded”. Checkpoints before the draft are unlimited; students “may be required to pass through other checkpoints, such as developing an outline or discussing their approach with the class teacher”.
On what the feedback may contain, the handbook offers a list rather than a restriction. Feedback may include suggestions such as “considering other aspects of the text, report, performance or activity”, “developing the response to show more awareness of the intended audience or purpose”, “rearranging the sequence and structure of the response to prioritise the most important points”, “further investigating a concept to expand the response”, and “adhering to the required response length”. It may be delivered “in writing or orally, to an individual or to the whole class, and/or through questioning”.
A related provision catches people out in the other direction. If you do not submit a final response, your draft is not ignored — it becomes the evidence. The handbook says developmental work “would be appropriate evidence to use to award a provisional mark if a final completed response is not provided on or before the due date”. That is covered in detail in the QCAA late assignment policy.
Queensland also made academic integrity an eligibility requirement: from 2026, students must complete an academic integrity course to qualify for the QCE, which the QCE academic integrity requirement explains.
New South Wales: NESA
New South Wales sets no draft limit and, for ordinary assessment tasks, no rule on what a teacher may write on your work. The ACE rules require schools to “provide students with feedback on their performance in each assessment task”, but that is feedback on the completed task rather than on a draft.
Where NESA does speak, it speaks about monitoring. Schools are encouraged to build “monitoring processes at key point(s) to assist in determining student authorship”, which “may include reviewing draft work, questioning and discussion with student(s) or opportunities for student self-reflection”, and may require students to “submit their original drafts in addition to their final work”. The draft is framed as evidence of authorship first and a feedback opportunity second.
The sharpest prohibition in New South Wales is subject-specific, and it is worth quoting because nothing in the general rules matches it. For the Visual Arts body of work: “Under no circumstances can any teacher or other person work directly on any part of a candidate's body of work submission.”
Major Works carry their own architecture. English Extension 2, Visual Arts, Society and Culture, Design and Technology and Industrial Technology all use the same formula — the work must be “conceived and executed by the student under the supervision of” the relevant teacher. The supervising teacher must “observe and document each student's progress”, “keep documented evidence to validate the authenticity and integrity of each student's work”, and sign a Student Declaration Form.
If a supervising teacher cannot vouch for a project, they may decline to certify it, and you get a formal right of reply. Non-certification applies where the teacher “is unable to certify that the work and/or a component of the work was completed by the student under their supervision”, and for the Society and Culture Personal Interest Project the student “should also complete this form, where they can refute or verify the allegations”.
Victoria: the VCAA
Victoria writes the clearest prohibition in the country, and it names your teacher directly.
Whether drafting happens at all depends on which kind of task you are doing. School-assessed coursework is mostly completed in class. School-assessed tasks are extended work in a small set of studies — Media, Visual Communication Design, Art Making and Exhibiting, Art Creative Practice, Product Design and Technologies, Systems Engineering, Applied Computing and Algorithmics — and there the teacher must “monitor and record each student's work development, from planning and drafting through to completion”.
For coursework, the VCE Administrative Handbook says teachers “are not required to formally sight drafts or record students' completion of drafts unless it is a requirement of the VCE study design and/or for authentication purposes”, and that drafting “can remain a part of a teaching and learning strategy”. No number, no obligation.
The limit is on the nature of the help. Students must “not receive undue assistance from another person, including their teacher, or source in the preparation and submission of work”. Unacceptable assistance is then itemised, and the list includes “corrections or improvements made or dictated by another person, including their teacher”, along with “use of or copying sample answers provided by their teacher”. Acceptable assistance is “prompting and general advice from another person or source, which leads to refinements or self-correction or both”.
On a school-assessed task, feedback is not optional and it is on the record. Teachers are “required to provide feedback to students on work in progress”, those comments “are to be noted on the Authentication record form”, and the form is “signed and dated by the teacher and student at each observation”. If the feedback was given elsewhere, it does not stay there: “If feedback is delivered through another platform — such as a school administration system — it must be copied onto the VCAA Authentication record form.”
One Victorian rule cuts against the student in a way worth knowing. Among the signals that work may not be a student's own, the handbook lists work that “has not been sighted and monitored by the teacher during its development”. A teacher who never looked at your drafts creates a problem that lands on you, not on them.
South Australia and the Northern Territory: the SACE Board
The SACE Board's Supervision and Verification of Students' Work policy is the most useful single document in the country on this question, because it is the only one written specifically about the boundary between helping and doing.
Northern Territory students are covered by it. NTCET students “study South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) subjects”, assessed under SACE Board policy, though the certificate itself is awarded by the Northern Territory Board of Studies rather than the SACE Board. No NT-specific drafting variation exists.
What a teacher may do: “It is acceptable in the developmental stages of an assessment task for the teacher to ask questions and to offer general advice — for example, about alternative strategies that might be tried.” Work remains acceptable where “the student has undertaken refinement or self-correction including that which arises from prompting or advice from another person or source”. Dictionaries, thesauruses and spell-checkers are fine “provided that students operate these themselves and make the changes that result”.
What a teacher may not do: “the teacher should not dictate or make specific changes in such a way as to put into question the student's authorship or ownership of that particular piece of work”. Subject advice sharpens it further — a teacher “may direct the student's attention to errors but must not explicitly correct these for the student”.
South Australia also puts the burden of proof somewhere students do not expect. A teacher signs a statement that the work is the student's own, and may withhold that signature: “A teacher may withhold his or her signature until sufficient evidence is available to show that the submitted material is the students' own work. In such circumstances the onus is on the students to give evidence that the work submitted was completed without undue assistance.” The policy also expects students to be able to produce the trail — “Students should be required to have available a series of drafts that demonstrate the development of the finished piece.”
Western Australia: the SCSA
Western Australia is the clearest case of devolution in the country. The word “draft” appears twice in the whole WACE Manual, both times about syllabus drafts and examination papers, never about student work. It appears not at all in the School Curriculum and Standards Authority's own sample school assessment policy.
There is no SCSA rule on how many drafts you get, no rule on how much of a draft may be annotated, and no draft-submission requirement. What SCSA requires instead is that every school write its own policy covering “authentication of student work, including cheating, collusion, plagiarism, appropriation, unacknowledged use of artificial intelligence applications”. In Western Australia your drafting entitlement is genuinely a local document.
The operative limit is the authenticity rule. A student may not submit as original any work “prepared or substantively contributed to by another person, e.g. student, teacher, tutor, expert”. The threshold is substantial contribution, and SCSA nowhere defines where advice becomes contribution.
A quirk worth noticing: the WACE Manual lists a teacher among the people whose substantial contribution makes work non-original, but the equivalent list in the student-facing Year 12 handbook names only “a parent, tutor or subject expert”. The student version of the rule quietly drops the teacher.
Tasmania: TASC
Tasmania sets no draft limit and, from 2026, has stepped back even further: TASC “no longer publishes a ‘due date to teacher' for externally assessed folios” and “schools will set their own internal due dates”.
Tasmania's contribution is evidentiary. The expectation is that the development is visible. Teachers are told to “frequently view and discuss student work in progress, recording these discussions in student learning logs and/or class assessment records”, and course specifications tell students to “make sure your teacher sights your Work journal regularly”. The English Literature specification goes further and requires the trail to be preserved: “Your teacher is required to see all versions of your work, so it is essential to ‘Save as' each time you produce a new draft.”
The one conduct limit is a phrase TASC never defines. Work “must be entirely original and must be completed without undue assistance from another person”. No TASC document says what undue assistance is, and none prohibits a teacher from editing or annotating a draft. Course specifications do push back against the opposite failure, noting that “it is not the intention that students should decide upon a focus and then be left to their own devices”.
If a teacher will not endorse a folio, the folio is still marked. Where it is not endorsed, “the school must undertake an internal review process”, and “regardless of outcome of the school's review process, the school must still submit the folio for marking”. Any penalty is decided later by a TASC panel rather than by the school or the individual teacher.
Australian Capital Territory: the BSSS
The ACT's Board of Senior Secondary Studies takes a procedural approach: it does not tell teachers what to do with drafts, it tells schools to publish whatever they have decided. The Policy and Procedures Manual lists among the required elements of a task coversheet a “clear statement of conditions under which the task will be undertaken, including any policy around the submission of drafts”.
There is no BSSS clause restricting teacher editing or assistance on a draft, and no maximum or minimum number of drafts. Feedback is regulated only after marking, where students “must be able to retain or retrieve the original or a copy of this marked work and the feedback for that work at the time it is returned”, generally within three weeks of the due date.
What the ACT does regulate hard is validation. Schools may require “the use of a controlled digital document with a ‘playback' or tracking function”, “the use of intermediate tasks or submitted drafts”, or a “validation testing/interview/viva voce”. The consequence is unusual and worth reading twice: “Failure to follow the school's mandated validation processes when completing an assessment item will be treated as a breach of academic integrity.” Declining to take part is itself the breach, whatever the truth about your authorship.
One adjacent rule limits what a draft can carry: “A validation measure alone must not be used to assign a mark or a grade to the student's work.” Since a submitted draft is a listed validation measure, a draft cannot on its own become the mark.
How to ask for feedback you can actually use
Once you know the boundary, you can ask questions that sit safely inside it and still get answers worth having. A teacher who is worried about crossing a line will give you less than they are allowed to; a specific question makes it easy for them to give you everything they can.
- Ask about a criterion, not a sentence. “Which criterion is weakest here?” is always answerable. “Is this paragraph good?” invites either a rewrite or a shrug.
- Ask what is missing rather than what is wrong. Absent evidence is the most common reason a response sits mid-band, and naming it is squarely permitted everywhere.
- Ask whether your response does what the task verb asks. Every jurisdiction allows a teacher to tell you that you have described where you were asked to evaluate.
- Ask about structure and sequence. Queensland lists rearranging the sequence “to prioritise the most important points” as an example of permitted feedback.
- Ask before the draft, not only at it. Pre-draft checkpoints — an outline, a plan, a conversation about your approach — are unrestricted in Queensland and unmentioned everywhere else, which makes them the cheapest help available.
- Write down what you were told, and date it. In Victoria and Tasmania that record is part of the authentication trail. Everywhere else it is still the thing that proves you did the revising.
- Do not ask for a mark. In Queensland it is the one thing the wording rules out, and in most other places the answer is unreliable anyway.
The revision passes that turn a comment into a changed mark are covered in why drafts matter before submission, and the sequence from task sheet to due date in the internal assessment timeline.
What if your teacher edited your draft?
It happens, usually with good intentions and usually to students who asked for help and got more than the rules allow. The important thing is that the consequence lands on the work, not on your character — but it does land.
Do not copy the changes in. That is the step that converts a teacher's error into your breach. In Victoria, work containing “corrections or improvements made or dictated by another person, including their teacher” is unacceptable by definition. In South Australia, work that “incorporates corrections or changes that the teacher or another person made” is unacceptable, and heavily edited work may not be “further developed or copied by students for resubmission”.
Instead, treat every mark on the page as a pointer rather than an instruction. If a sentence has been rewritten for you, work out what was wrong with yours and fix it your own way. If a correction has been made, find the other three places you made the same mistake and correct those yourself. The resulting work is both better and defensible.
If the edits are extensive enough that you are unsure the work is still yours, raise it with the teacher or the head of faculty before you submit rather than after. Every jurisdiction has an investigation process that begins with a conversation, and every one of them is easier to have while the deadline is still ahead of you. Your school's assessment policy and the academic integrity page are the places to start.
AI and the draft your teacher sees
No authority in Australia bans AI outright in school-based assessment. All of them treat unattributed use as plagiarism or collusion, and all of them push the permission question down to the school.
Queensland lists as misconduct a student who “creates work using AI and does not provide attribution”, and separately one who “lists incorrect or fictitious references, such as false or misleading information generated from the use of AI”. New South Wales folds unauthorised AI into collusion and requires that “all marks awarded for the HSC must reflect students' own knowledge and capability independent of AI”. Victoria treats AI as a source caught by its acknowledgement rule, warning that “unattributed or disallowed use of genAI in assessment may be a breach of academic integrity”. Tasmania's policy defines plagiarism to include “information developed using artificial intelligence tools capable of simulating human behaviour and thinking”. The ACT lists “submitting work generated by artificial intelligence as a student's own work” among its examples of plagiarism.
Two jurisdictions are more specific about what acknowledgement looks like. South Australia expects a declaration that names “which tools were used” and provides “a list of all prompts that were entered to generate any information for the task”. Western Australia's model policy allows AI to generate assessment content only where “authorised by the teacher in writing”.
The practical consequence of all this is the same in every state: your draft history is your defence. A dated trail of your own drafts answers the question a detector cannot, which is why Tasmania asks students to save each version and the ACT accepts document playback as a validation measure.
Takeaways
- The line is the same everywhere: your teacher may work on your understanding, not on your document. If a comment leaves you with a change to transcribe rather than a problem to solve, it has gone too far.
- Queensland is the only jurisdiction that limits you to one draft, and it must be in the mode the syllabus requires. Everywhere else the number is your school's decision.
- Victoria and South Australia are the only authorities that state the prohibition in plain words, and both name the teacher explicitly as a possible source of a breach.
- Queensland's famous rule is thinner than its reputation: no itemised list of forbidden teacher conduct exists, only “a consultative process, not a marking process”.
- In New South Wales, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, the operative document is your school assessment policy and your task sheet, not the certificate authority's manual.
- A final that does not resemble any draft your teacher saw is the most common way authentication fails, and in South Australia the burden of proving otherwise is explicitly yours.
- Do not transcribe a teacher's corrections. In Victoria and South Australia that specific act is what makes the work unacceptable.
- Keep dated drafts. They are the one piece of evidence that works in every jurisdiction and against every kind of doubt.
Where these rules come from
Queensland: the QCAA's QCE and QCIA policy and procedures handbook, version 7.0, January 2026, sections 8.1, 8.2.5, 8.2.6 and 8.2.8. New South Wales: the NESA ACE rules on assessment programs, project certification and malpractice, plus subject-level Major Work advice. Victoria: the VCE Administrative Handbook 2026 and the annual study-level administrative information for school-assessed tasks. South Australia and the Northern Territory: the SACE Board's Supervision and Verification of Students' Work policy, subject assessment advice, and the NT Department of Education's guidance on the NTCET. Western Australia: the WACE Manual 2026 sections 2.3, 2.6 and 6.4, and the Authority's sample school assessment policy. Tasmania: the TASC academic integrity policy, external assessment rules and course specifications. ACT: the BSSS Policy and Procedures Manual 2026, sections 4.2.5 and 4.2.10, and the Quality Assessment Guidelines.
Rules change, and several of these documents are revised annually. Your school's current assessment policy and the conditions printed on your task sheet take precedence over anything here — in five of the eight jurisdictions they are not merely more current, they are the actual rule.
