D94,
Firstly, thank you for correcting my original post on the moderation of internal marks (I wasn't quiet sure about this aspect). However, I think you are "deviating" from the original purpose of this thread and are perhaps starting to confuse the original poster. Also, I strongly disagree with your understanding of raw marks. They DO NOT matter
in the sense of your overall HSC mark (average of internal and external). That is, a person who receives an internal mark "raw" mark of 60% is still able to get a HSC mark of 90+ - that is, if they scored 95% in the HSC and then (because, say they were ranked first) also receive a "moderated" internal mark of 95% (so, because they came first they recieve the highest external mark of their school as their internal mark - 95) and thus receive the average of the two - giving an overall mark of 95. However, they do matter in the sense that these raw marks determine the rank you come in your school, thus affecting the moderated internal mark you get (but your external mark will always stay the same - after "aligning" (but that's a different story)) and this would consequently affect the average between your external and internal mark to give you your HSC mark.
Just to confirm, school ranks do not matter. However,
generally an internal exam from a higher ranking school e.g. 1 to that of a lower rank e.g. 300 would
generally be harder than the latters. This is primarily due to the overall student ability at each school. At higher ranked schools, the calibre of the students is normally very high and thus they need to set challenging exams for the students as means to give them ranks - it would be no good if everyone got 100% as ranking them would be impossible - but instead, have some get e.g. 90,98,84 etc. However, at a lower ranking school they would not set such as hard exams as if all students fail e.g. getting 40,39,38,41,39, 39, this is both damaging the students and is also an ineffective ranking methodology.
We are all made to set the HSC exam as a means of
moderating these differences in "difficulty" and the raw marks obtained by students - that's its purpose. So if a school set an extremely hard exam compared to that of a school who just set really easy exams can be compared.
For example,
School 1 has students with the following marks:
Internal External
60 90
62 92
74 98
58 88
65 91
These students would have these internal marks "moderated" upwards to account for their clear ability (I won't go into detail about how they do this, but it is based on your internal ranks etc.)
School 2 however, has the following marks:
Internal External
98 74
94 78
97 69
99 80
100 75
These students would have their marks moderated down to account for their clear lower ability then that of school one.
Thus, school 1 would have a higher calbri and (strong and general word) "better" students then school 2, disregarding their clearly lower marks in their school. In this way, the students from different schools can be equally compared.
School one can be generalised as the kind of mark differences (internal to external) you see at a "higher ranked school", whilst school two can be seen as a generalisation for prehapes a lower ranked school who sets easier exams as means to rank the students, or to ensure they all just don't fail.
In the end, the students from school one get the better marks because they performed better in the external exam, with the student who placed first in that school and course recieving the highest internal moderated mark (but not necessarily the highest external mark - as this stays the same no matter what (after aligning) e.g. they may get a moderated internal mark of 98 (because this was the highest external mark) they may have bombed the external exam and only got 85 - so their end HSC mark would be the average of the two (low 90's))
That's all i can think to type now
If i've made minor errors please feel free to point them out (not grammar errors - I cbf to proof read
)
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
If I've made everyone more confused - sorry