Quick question, if I'm coming first in a subject out of two people and in my final yearly report I get say 80%, and then it's time for the HSC and I get a raw mark of 65, what will my final mark be?
After your raw exam marks are aligned (adjusted to the BOSTES standards), the sum of all the aligned exam marks of your cohort will be distributed among your cohort; this is what makes your assessment mark. The distribution of these marks is dependent upon your rank in the cohort and the relative spaces between the ranks.
For example
If your raw assessment mark is 80, and the other person gets 50, then the BOS will note that you are better than the other person by a specific amount (idk if the BoS works it out by percentages, i.e. person 2's mark was 62.5% yours, or by some other calculation). Then they totally disregard the numerical value which your school submitted.
Then, you'll sit the HSC exam, get a raw mark of 65, which might be aligned to 75 for example. Say the other person gets raw 60 and aligned 70. Then, to calculate your assessment mark, they'll take the sum of the aligned marks (75+70=145), and distribute them among the cohort according to the ranking and distances between ranks (if they do indeed calculate distances by percentages, then in this scenario you would get an assessment mark of 89 and the other person would get 56)
Your final HSC mark is the average between assessment mark and aligned exam mark.