As our Year 12 students celebrated their end-of-year results, staff at the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia (SSABSA) were debriefing on another successful campaign.

Virtually all SSABSA staff, managers included, help pack results for mailing -
a team building exercise as well as a final integrity check.

Just before Christmas, SSABSA completed its annual military-style operation to print, distribute, collect and mark more than 93,000 individual exam papers and deliver the results to around 17,000 Year 12 students.

From October each year, tens of thousands of exam papers for 70 different subjects are printed, counted and packaged for distribution to 230 schools and examination centres in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Malaysia, and to individual students across the globe. Security is a priority, with the papers guarded literally under lock and key, in school safes and local banks. After each exam is held papers are returned to SSABSA, with six couriers visiting schools in the Adelaide metropolitan area twice daily for collection.

The enormous and painstaking - yet speedy - task of assessment, involving 700 trained markers, then takes place. In 2001, the last exam was held on November 26, with results literally in students' letterboxes on December 19.

In those three weeks, SSABSA had to check examples of school-assessed work, make appropriate adjustments, calculate individual Tertiary Entrance Ranking scores, print certificates and associated documents and prepare data for the simultaneous on-line release. More than one million individual bits of data must be entered into the database.

All students receive their results on the same day, whether they live in Kurralta Park or Kuala Lumpur - because every individual SSABSA customer must be given the same opportunity to digest that SACE result and plan how to use it. Many will want to attend overseas universities, and must move quickly to secure places.

Then, until Christmas and beyond, SSABSA moves into 'enquiries mode'. Trained staff, backed up with comprehensive and instantly-accessible data, respond to student enquiries over a telephone hotline. This December the hotline was quiet, with few queries. Mission accomplished.