NSW ends HSC take-home tasks, SA rolls EdChat statewide

Digital Attitudes, 11 August 2026

Tuesday, and the two biggest state education systems in the country picked opposite lanes on AI inside the same seven days.

Prue Car asks NESA to freeze HSC take-home tasks while it works out how to police AI

Deputy Premier and Minister for Education Prue Car wrote to the NSW Education Standards Authority on Monday asking it to consider a moratorium on unsupervised, take home assessment tasks for the Higher School Certificate, and to build a common approach for teachers to identify inappropriate AI use in student work (NSW Government ministerial release, 10 August). Roughly half of every HSC mark is school based assessment, and a chunk of that is currently done at home. Any changes would land at the start of Term 4 this year, hitting the class of 2027 first, with major art and design and technology projects expected to stay exempt. Car's framing is unambiguous: technology should enhance education, not diminish it, and if students rely on AI to bypass the learning process, both their education and the integrity of the HSC are at risk.

Why this matters: the government is not banning AI in schools, it is trying to move the assessment surface to where AI cannot do the work. The honest read is that AI detection has failed as a policy tool (OpenAI shut down its own classifier at about 26 per cent accuracy on AI text and 9 per cent false positives on human writing), so NESA is being asked to design the assessment around the problem instead of policing it after the fact. That means more supervised in class writing, more oral defence, more staged drafting with teacher checkpoints, and a bigger role for the trial online systems (Gradeo for CSSA HSC trials, and whatever NESA lands on for the school based half). It also lands one week after the Heads Up Alliance petition to strip AI and 1:1 devices crossed 4,000 signatures, and reads as the Minns Government taking that political heat off the table before Term 4.

SA doubles down: EdChat goes statewide to every public high school from Term 4

The Department for Education in Adelaide will roll out its purpose built AI, EdChat, to every public high school in South Australia from Term 4, alongside an independent Insights Report on the two year trial (Cyber Daily on the SA EdChat rollout, Mirage News). EdChat was built with Microsoft on Azure OpenAI, has been in trial since 2023 with more than 10,000 students, and enforces a no full answers guardrail designed to force reasoning rather than copy paste. The trial data is respectable: 40 per cent of students and 36 per cent of educators used the tool at least once, 93 per cent of prompts were curriculum related, and the top student uses were language practice, working through mathematics, and rephrasing task instructions. Minister Blair Boyer's line is short: "we have embraced the technology, rather than attempt to ignore it and ban it."

Why this matters: South Australia is now the only state in the country running its own guarded AI tenant at scale for students, and it is doing it the same week NSW is trying to shrink the surface on which AI can be used. Two operating models are now visible for Australian principals, and they are close to opposites. The SA bet is that a purpose built, tenanted model with logging, content filters and pedagogical guardrails is safer than trying to keep general purpose AI off the school laptop. The NSW bet is that assessment redesign will do the work no detector can. Every state education department, and every non government sector body, is going to be pushed to pick a lane on this in the next twelve months, and both bets are testable in the data: watch NAPLAN writing distributions, HSC school based mark spreads, and EdChat's own logged usage as the natural experiment plays out.

Two states, two bets, one country. The evidence will be visible by mid 2027, and there will not be a lot of room to hide.