95 = top 5%? (1 Viewer)

[Guage]

When you enter your 'score' for each course into SAM, say I put '95' for Physics for the 'aligned HSC Mark'.

Does this mean beating 95% of the course candidature in Physics, ie. my result for exam and internal course places me in the top 5%?

Cheers

 

[Pwnage101]

No, no, no and no!!

 

[Guage]

No?

 

[Tully B.]

No!!!! Only the UAI (or ATAR) is a rank. Everything else is a mark, scaled as it may be.

 

[Guage]

Oh dear. There I was thinking I'd have to get in the top 5% of all my courses to get 99 ATAR...

Tully, doesn't a 'scaled mark' mean your rank anyway? Wouldn't a 95 scaled mark in Physics be top 5%?

 

[Tully B.]

No, scaled does not make it a rank, it is a mere acknowledgement of variation in difficulty amongst courses. For example, getting a mark of 80 in Extension 2 Maths is a much greater feat than getting a 95 in VA, and the scaling system acknowledges this by SCALING the maths mark up to near 100.

 

[Tully B.]

There's also the alignment of marks to consider, but I don't understand the process enough to explain it comprehensively.

 

[youngminii]

Hold on, that 95 isn't your scaled mark. It's your aligned HSC mark. The HSC mark is completely different to your scaled mark. One is aligned by the Board of Studies, one is scaled by the UAC.

Edit: What this means is that scaling and aligning are two completely different processes. Your HSC mark technically does not have any relationship with your ATAR, since your ATAR is derived from your scaled mark. What SAM does is it estimates a relationship between the HSC marks and scaled marks in previous years and using that relationship, it lets you calculate your estimated ATAR based on your HSC marks.

 

[Tully B.]

Whoops, my bad. I got mixed up. I've never used a UAI calculator before, and I should have known that it would have been based on the aligned HSC marks... whoops again.

 

[Pwnage101]

from memory only about 7% of physics students get a band 6, whereas like 2% get less than 50 (i am talking aligned/moderated marks)

 

[Guage]

Thanks guys, I kind of understand...

from memory only about 7% of physics students get a band 6, whereas like 2% get less than 50 (i am talking aligned/moderated marks)

I thought Band 6 was top 10% of students? Or is it something to do with a raw mark that is scaled according to that external Physics exam's difficulty? And only 7% of Physics students achieved this 'scaled' mark of over 90?

And say, 15% of Geography students scored over 90% raw in their external exam, but, when scaled down, only 5% achieved a scaled mark of >90, in effect 5% Geo students got band 6?

edit: or am I still mixing up scaled and aligned...

 

[youngminii]

Guage, you seem to be quite mixed up.
Your HSC mark is not your scaled mark. That means your Band doesn't depend on your scaled mark.
The way the BoS aligns your mark is that they create a Band 'cutoff' (based on the raw mark) that depends on the difficulty of the exam. So let's say Maths is out of 120 and it was pretty hard in one year, the BoS decides to make the Band 6 cutoff 100 (this is only an example). Anyone that got higher than 100 raw would now get a Band 6. Now since the raw marks of the Band range from 100-120, these must be squeezed in to fit the 90-100 HSC mark.
This means that if everyone that sat the test got 100+ everyone would get a Band 6. Do you notice how it isn't a rank, only a mark? It just so happens that in last year's Physics test, only 7% of the cohort managed to get a raw mark higher than the Band 6 cutoff.
The scaled mark is derived separately, again from the raw mark.