PLANS to streamline Higher School Certificate papers and external marking will cut costs and threatens to downgrade courses, teachers have said.

The NSW Board of Studies has invited teachers to take part in a public consultation that will run through the busy HSC exam period until October 17, to discuss proposals to restructure the HSC exams.

Teachers fear the quality of subjects including English, visual arts and society and culture, which include a practical component, is under threat of being downgraded.

The Board of Studies has proposed abolishing costly external marking of the society and culture research project, which is worth 30 per cent of the HSC exam mark. Under the board's proposals, written examinations would make up the total external mark and the project would be marked internally as part of the school assessment.

Jodi Arrow, the president of the Society and Culture Association, said the board was under pressure from the State Government to make cost savings of up to $1 million.

She said the board proposals would help cut costs by reducing external marking and administration of the personal interest project by about a week, and add up to an hour to the student examination.

The board has publicly said the restructure is designed to reduce exam stress, but Ms Arrow said the changes would increase students' stress.

"We appreciate that the State Government is broke and needs to save money, but we are very annoyed that they have come out with these false reasons for what they are doing," she said. "Reduction in HSC stress doesn't make any sense because you are increasing the size of the HSC and getting rid of the personal interest project."

Ms Arrow said one of her students did focus groups and interviews with dozens of women as part of her project, which explored gender roles in Australia. Removal of the external assessment, which ensured statewide benchmarking and common standards, "would be like trying to assess visual arts or textiles without students submitting a major work - the [project] is this fundamental to the assessment of the course".

English teachers fear a similar fate for the advanced extension 2 course which requires students to do their own research project.

The Board of Studies said proposals for the course were still being developed because the course was the subject of an Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation into cheating.

The executive officer of the English Teachers Association of NSW, Eva Gold, said the board proposed to introduce short-answer questions and to condense the two, two-hour English exams into a single three-hour paper.

"There was a strong view that there should be no examination component in extension 2 English," she said.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Board of Studies said the HSC proposals had taken several years to develop. She refused to comment when asked directly about whether the board had been asked to make $1 million in savings.