  UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy is a unique institution
in Australia as it attracts its undergraduate students from all Australian
states and territories more or less in accord with the distribution of the
Australian population. Each course at UNSW Canberra is then made up of a cohort
of students who have undertaken secondary education in the different states and
territories but who, at university, are undertaking the same course with the
same assessment as one another. This allows some comparison to be made as to
how the various state and territory secondary education systems have prepared
them for their tertiary study at UNSW Canberra.
  In this paper we conduct a preliminary analysis of the performance of UNSW
Canberra engineering students in the first year, first semester courses
Engineering Mathematics 1A and Engineering Physics 1A. The results obtained
thus far demonstrate that while there is little difference in performance
between students from most states and territories, performance of students from
one state is well below that of the others.
