Assessment Type 2: Musical Literacy

For a 10‑credit subject, students undertake at least one musical literacy task.

For a 20‑credit subject, students undertake at least two musical literacy tasks.

The tasks should enable students to demonstrate their musical literacy skills, communicate their musical ideas, and use appropriate musical terminology.

The musical literacy tasks should be designed to develop students’ ability to make informed judgments about their performances and arrangements or compositions and reflect on their own creative work.

Musical literacy tasks could include (but are not restricted to), for example:

• aural recognition/identification (e.g. melodic or rhythmic dictation)
• sight‑reading
• an analysis and discussion of style, structure, and musical elements in one or more selected works 
• a reflection on the development and refinement of the students’ own creative work.

A musical literacy task should be to a maximum of 650 words if written, or a maximum of 4 minutes if oral and/or in multimodal form. 

For this assessment type, students provide evidence of their learning primarily in relation to the following assessment design criteria:

• understanding music
• responding to music.