1. Your school submits your
internal marks
2. You do the external HSC
3. Highest raw external HSC mark in your cohort becomes the
ceiling (highest possible mark) for the your cohort's internal marks in that subject
4. Likewise, the lowest raw external HSC mark becomes the
floor (lowest possible mark) for your cohort's internal marks in that subject
5. Rank 1
gets assigned the ceiling mark as his
moderated assessment mark (
MAM), and the
lowest rank gets the
floor mark. Everyone in between's MAM gets
moderated via the
difference in
submitted internal marks between
adjacent ranks.
6. Your external HSC mark and your MAM is
aligned--your mark in a subject gets
exponentially increased the higher your percentile (mark compared to the rest of the state), and inversely,
exponentially decreases the more you go below 50th or so percentile.
7. Your
aligned external mark is averaged with your aligned internal MAM
8. The end result is your
HSC mark
e.g. if you get a MAM of 70 and an aligned external of 90, you'd pretty much get 80 as your HSC mark.
As for your ATAR, there's what, 60 people per 0.05 increment?
Therefore the ATAR is pretty much a
rank. The higher your final HSC mark is in comparison to the state, the higher your ATAR is. People are put into an ATAR increment until it is filled and this continues until all year 12 uni applicants are assigned an ATAR. People who get <30 ATAR are given a star (aka a mystery mark) for trying at least.
Here's the BoS page if you still need further clarification:
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/hsc-results/understanding.html
, doing higher scaling subjects also helps...