Hey!
Last year I sat the HSC and like most students, I tried my best to accurately predict my HSC marks (and thus, my ATAR) using my internal assessment ranks since my school didn't give us ATAR predictions. Long story short, I pretty accurately predicted my HSC marks (I was 1 mark off for every single one of my subjects except 4U English but that's always unpredictable haha). My ATAR prediction was about one point off but new syllabus changed scaling a bit so that was unpredictable.
Basically, here are the steps of what I've learned and used to predict my marks.
Good luck to everyone doing the HSC, hopefully people find this helpful : )
Last year I sat the HSC and like most students, I tried my best to accurately predict my HSC marks (and thus, my ATAR) using my internal assessment ranks since my school didn't give us ATAR predictions. Long story short, I pretty accurately predicted my HSC marks (I was 1 mark off for every single one of my subjects except 4U English but that's always unpredictable haha). My ATAR prediction was about one point off but new syllabus changed scaling a bit so that was unpredictable.
Basically, here are the steps of what I've learned and used to predict my marks.
- Use HSC ninja to find the number of B6s in a subject. I did this just by control f and searching up the subject name but there is probably an easier way to do this lmao. Make sure you check the previous years as well to get a rough idea of how many B6s there are generally to try and get a range (eg for modern history in the past 3 years, 6-10 people got a B6 in my school).
- Use your internal ranks to put yourself against this (eg if you are ranked 8th and only 6-10 people in your school usually get a B6, you're looking at a low B6 or high B5). This does depend on your cohort though, so if you know they are particularly good or bad at one subject, adjust this slightly
- Some schools release a document called the annual report. In this long ass document, they will include tables with their HSC results with the distributions of the HSC bands of different subjects (eg 80% of students achieved a band 5 or higher in modern history). Using this and your school's rank will give you a good idea about the distribution of the marks (if you are a top 10 school, you're looking at very close distribution for HSC marks in the high 80s, if you're in a school ranked in the 300s then there will be a much wider distribution of marks from 90s to 50s etc).
- Using your rank, number of typical B6s and typical distribution of marks, you should be able to accurately predict your mark. Obviously this does depend on your cohort's performance AND your own HSC performance but it will give you a pretty good estimate to put into ATAR calculators.
Good luck to everyone doing the HSC, hopefully people find this helpful : )