Registrations are open.

No. There is some flexibility about when you can run the competition to fit with your particular school’s diary and timetable. We do specify that if you run the competition earlier that you must collect all papers and source sheets and keep them secure until after the competition has finished.

No. We want the Australian History Competition to be as easy for teachers to run as possible. To save the need for gathering all students in one location or changing the timetable, you can run the competition in your normal timetabled classes provided that you collect all competition papers and source sheets and keep them secure until the competition is completed.

The Australian History Competition will help your teaching in many ways. It provides an interesting, challenging and rewarding experience that will help motivate your students. The AHC also showcases to students and other staff that History is an important subject with opportunities to excel at a national level. By providing you with feedback about your students’ performance against national bench marks the Australian History Competition enables you to highlight areas of teaching where you (and your colleagues) excel. It also enables you to highlight areas of the curriculum where you may need to place more emphasis.

No. Your year 7 students are marked only against the year 7 students from other schools. The year 8 students are marked separately. The same applies for year 9 students. If you download the sample questions above and read the notes at the end you’ll see that in all competition questions we test student for skills in interpreting data rather than their previous knowledge.

The questions are designed to test historical skills and concepts so the content that students have covered is not significant to the way students may perform.

Teachers get online access to the results of each student for each question. We also provide school, state and national averages for each question so that you can compare how you students are performing. This year we are aiming to link each of the questions to specific historical skills and concepts specified in the Australian Curriculum: History so that teachers can see how their students are performing against the key elements of the curriculum.

No. At this stage, with the experience of NAPLAN and the South Australian online testing system, we believe that the technical problems are too great. Most teachers find the current paper system easy to use and we don’t want to create extra stress for classroom teachers that can be caused by technical problems outside our control.

We will still mark late returns, but students will not be eligible for State or National Champion awards