For Queensland families · Years 11–12
Senior assessment,
from home.
Free guides, calculators and AI draft feedback for distance education families doing QCAA senior assessment. Understand the task, read the marking guide, and know what to work on next.
See the free resourcesNo account needed for the guides and calculators.
Two ways of learning at home
Distance education: your student is enrolled in a school that sets the assessment, marks it and reports the results. They sit the same QCAA senior assessment as any other Queensland student, so everything on this page applies.
Registered home education: registering directly with Queensland Home Education is a different pathway. It does not by itself lead to an ATAR or involve school-issued QCAA internal assessment, though the guides here are still useful if your student is heading toward senior subjects.
Home Education QLD’s distance education guide and teen pathways overview are good starting points for comparing the two.
Free resources
Everything a parent needs to understand senior assessment
New to QCAA assessment? Start with the parent guide. Already in the thick of it? Jump to the marking guide explainers or the calculators.
Start here
The parent guide to senior assessment
How Years 11 and 12 work in Queensland: drafts, internal and external assessment, subject results, and where a parent fits in.
Marking guides
What an ISMG actually is
The Instrument-Specific Marking Guide is how every internal assessment is marked. Learn what its criteria and mark bands mean.
Marking guides
Reading the ISMG together
Sit down with the task sheet and work out, line by line, what the top mark band is asking for.
Calculator
Subject Result Calculator
Combine internal and external assessment marks to see what a subject result could look like.
Calculator
ATAR Calculator
See how different subject results could combine into an ATAR, and which subjects matter most.
Reference
QCAA assessment glossary
Plain-language definitions for criteria, confirmation, endorsement, QCE, ATAR and the rest of the senior assessment vocabulary.
Helping at home
Help with the process.
Keep the work theirs.
You do not need to know the subject to be useful. Three habits make the difference for most families.
- 1
Keep the task documents together
The task sheet, the ISMG, the due dates and any draft instructions. Most questions about a task are answered somewhere in that pile.
- 2
Ask your student to explain the task
What do they need to demonstrate, and where does the ISMG describe it? Explaining it out loud usually shows them what they have and have not covered yet.
- 3
Work on one criterion at a time
Pick the criterion with the most room to improve, find the evidence already in the draft, and let the student decide what to change. A focused revision beats a rewrite.
AI draft feedback
A second reader for every draft, without a teacher down the hall
Upload the draft and the task’s ISMG. ISMGenius reads the work against each criterion, estimates the mark band, shows the evidence it found, and sets out what to improve before the next draft.
It never writes the assignment. Your student keeps ownership of the work and gets the kind of criterion-by-criterion feedback that is hard to come by when the teacher is a video call away.
Get feedback on a draftThe first report needs no account.
How ISMGenius fits with academic integrity
Demonstration data shown. Feedback is organised criterion by criterion in the same view.