Why is that unfair? If that person beat you by so much internally he deserves to be compensated for that. HSC is supposed to represent the whole year not just one test. Also your internal mark would be closer to 80 not 65.
I think you misunderstood that he/she misunderstood the aligning process lol.
@someth1ing, actually the difference in score DOES matter but it really depends on how big the cohort is and how close the marks are. Obviously if it's a 2 person cohort, you will get each other's marks (usually - see below) if you rank differently. That's because (as Shadowdude kind of tried to say), BOS attempts to align the external marks with the distribution of the internal marks. So if there's a massive difference in moderated external marks and a massive difference in raw internal marks, well yeah your internal is going to align pretty poorly huh. That's why it's so important to improve the whole cohort. BOS will query/check up/ignore marks in special cases if something seems wrong though (see below), particularly if it's like a 2 person cohort scenario.
@Skriker, I read somewhere (can't find the doc - some 2002 report) that BOS excludes unexpected outliers, e.g. if there are 50 people in the cohort with rank 2 = 98/100 internal and rank 45 = 62/100 internal, then suddenly rank 2 bombs out in externals and comes rank 45 (with most other people having similar ranks) they don't include his/her mark when they're aligning the average of the moderated externals with the average of the internals (otherwise it'd be pretty unfair if some guy decides to non-attempt his HSC for some reason)
