SACE Stage 2 Psychology cheat sheet

SACE Stage 2 Psychology school assessment is split into Assessment Type 1: Skills and Application Tasks (40%) and Assessment Type 2: Investigations Folio (30%); the externally assessed component (30%) is the examination.

Skills and Application Tasks require students to apply psychological knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios and to interpret data, so responses must link a named concept to the specific evidence given rather than describe the concept generally.

Investigations Folio includes at least one investigation with a design and ethics component; ethical considerations must name the relevant principle (informed consent, confidentiality, deception, withdrawal rights, protection from harm) and describe the concrete procedure used.

Performance standards in Psychology use the same grade descriptors across all assessment types: knowledge and understanding, application and analysis, and evaluation and justification; each task's rubric should map its criteria to these strands.

A hypothesis must be operationalised: it states the independent and dependent variables in measurable terms and predicts a direction or difference, not merely that a relationship exists.

Validity and reliability are distinct: validity concerns whether the task measures the intended construct, reliability concerns consistency of results across repeated measurement or raters.

In experimental designs, random allocation to groups supports internal validity by distributing participant variables; random selection instead concerns the generalisability of the sample to the population.

Assessment tasks are moderated against the performance standards, so evidence must be documented in the task itself (raw data, logs, drafts) rather than asserted after the fact.

The external examination contributes 30% of the Stage 2 Psychology grade and samples the full set of topics through multiple-choice, short-answer and extended-response questions.

Multiple-choice items are scored dichotomously; short-answer items use partial credit against marking criteria, so each required element (identify, explain, apply, evaluate) should be addressed explicitly.

Extended-response questions are marked against criteria that reward accurate terminology, application to the scenario provided, and evaluation that weighs strengths against limitations.

Command words determine depth: 'identify' or 'state' requires a term or fact; 'explain' requires a mechanism or reason; 'analyse' requires breaking a scenario into components and linking them; 'evaluate' requires a judgement supported by evidence.

Statistical interpretation is examinable: a result described as significant at p < 0.05 indicates the observed difference is unlikely under the null hypothesis, not that the effect is large or practically important.

Descriptive statistics (mean, median, mode, range, standard deviation) summarise data; inferential reasoning concerns whether a difference in sample data plausibly reflects a population effect.

Correlation coefficients range from -1 to +1; the sign indicates direction and the magnitude indicates strength, and correlation alone does not establish causation.

In research-methods questions, identifying a confounding variable requires naming a factor that varies systematically with the independent variable and independently affects the dependent variable.

Ethical evaluation answers must apply principles to the described study, stating a specific safeguard and why it protects participants, rather than listing principles generically.