Committee chair Rod Yager said that was "extraordinarily large", and a "dramatic change" from all previous analysis, which had shown students with equivalent mathematics ability in year 9 or 10 obtained "essentially the same ATAR" whether they took advanced or general maths in the HSC.
The scaling system is supposed to iron out any advantage students could gain by choosing one subject over another, which made this week's findings a concern.
"I’m rather at a loss to explain why this should be the case," Dr Yager said. "Just as people would be worried if students were being advantaged by taking the less difficult course, they should also be worried if students were deriving an undue advantage from taking the more difficult course."
Rod Yager
The disparity could arise because advanced maths students were "responding to the challenge", Dr Yager said, or it could be related to them performing better in all of their other HSC subjects.
"We’re going to have to investigate further as to why this is happening and see if there's anything we can and should do about it," he said.
The study, finalised by the committee late on Monday, comes as Dr Finkel disparaged the ATAR as a "completely obscure" tool that dissuaded students from taking higher levels of maths in favour of easier subjects.
He told Fairfax Media the system should be simplified so that it could be more easily understood - or even abolished altogether.
But Dr Yager said his committee's latest analysis was "totally at odds with the public perception that students gain an ATAR advantage by taking Mathematics General", the easier course.
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Data shows 31,758 students took general mathematics in the 2016 HSC, a slight increase on the previous year, while 16,139 took the harder mathematics course, a slight decrease. Enrolments in the more difficult extension units also dipped slightly.
Dr Yager, who also lectures in mathematics at Macquarie University, said HSC maths enrolments actually rebounded in 2017, while science participation "has been stable for a long time".
NSW has introduced a new mathematics curriculum in the senior years which will be examined for the first time in 2019. The NSW Education Standards Authority will also provide information which will enable experts to "better mesh" students' scores across the different maths courses.
"Once we have that, we will be able to entirely address any question that there’s a possibility of gaining an advantage by doing a particular subject," Dr Yager told Fairfax Media.
"That will completely take that out of the equation."
Almost three quarters of school leavers who enrol at university get in using their ATAR, and its calculation is a frequently misunderstood science. The ATAR is not a mark out of 100 but a rank - a ranking of 80 means the student has performed better than 80 per cent of their year 7 cohort.
Michael Koziol is the immigration and legal affairs reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Parliament House
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