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Not published. RACS does not publish a pass mark or a pass rate — the GSSE is criterion-referenced 1. Every number in circulation, including the widely quoted ~59%, comes from exam-prep vendors reconstructing it 3. What RACS does publish is the rule that matters: fail one component and you fail overall 1.
The honest answer: RACS does not publish it. There is no official GSSE pass rate and no published pass mark. The exam is criterion-referenced, so the standard is set against the content rather than a fixed percentage or a fixed quota of passes 1. Candidates from the February 2026 sitting also report that cut scores are no longer released with results — only cohort averages 4.
What is in circulation, and who is selling it. The ~59–60% figure that dominates Google comes from GSSE prep companies; one quotes 843 sittings and 497 passes in 2024 3. Treat that as secondary and conflicted: the organisations publishing GSSE pass rates are the organisations selling GSSE courses, and a scary number is good for business. It may well be roughly right. It is not official, and it should never be presented as if RACS said it.
What the community reports. Candidates describe an overall threshold around 63% or above with component passes near 60%, and say the mark moves between sittings with the cohort 4. A longer-serving cohort recalls pass rates of 30–50% back when the exam was the "part 1" and used negative marking 5. All of this is lore — unverified, self-selected, and inconsistent between people who sat the same paper.
The number that actually governs you. Component failure is overall failure regardless of your aggregate, with anatomy carrying roughly half the weight 1. People fail one component by a fraction of a percent and resit the whole thing at A$4,850 42. That structural rule does more damage than the headline rate does.
What to do with all of this. Assume the exam fails a meaningful minority every sitting, assume anatomy is where it happens, and plan the resit fee into your budget rather than your self-esteem.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
It used to be called the 'part 1', if you got a question wrong you lost a mark (negative marking) instead of just not getting anything for it so guessing was a dangerous game, and the pass rate was 30-50%.
Pass mark fluctuates and it depends on the cohort sitting the exam - it gets scaled accordingly . You could pass 2 components and fail the 3rd by 1% and that's a overall fail
Having just done and passed the GSSE in Feb they have stopped giving cut scores as of this year. They give averages but that doesn't help.
As someone who failed path the first time by 0.2%, I know how much it sucks to for this exam twice.
Asked 7 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(GSSE|exam).{0,35}(pass rate|fail rate|pass mark|scor)|pass rate/i. Quotes were selected from candidates who had just sat the exam and could speak to how results are reported, with the historical 'part 1' comparison kept for context; no vendor claim was quoted as if it were a college figure.