Or they just don't want to tell everyone that they've failed
What does fail mean? A HSC mark of less than 50? In that case I didn't fail anything.
Or do you mean coming in the bottom 50% of the candidature of that subject? If that's the case, then I only just "failed" Advanced English since I got a mark that placed me in the very bottom of band 5, and by looking at the HSC 2002 stats, it seems that just a little bit more than 50% of students beat me