Option Topics: Different Scaling? (1 Viewer)

[DeathB4Life]

can your school deciding to pick a harder option topic be a disadvantage? lets say out of all schools that pick this certain option topic there is clearly a lower average/median/mean/whatever in marks when compared to the schools who picked another option topic, would there be any scaling to even out the marks?

reason i ask this is because my school picked genetics as our option topic for biology. im doing "alright" with it, but alot of the concepts seem more like simplified theories which just magically produce results without really going into detail on the explanations of why it happens (atleast from the syllabus). i feel the topic is more "memorise all these things we tell you because we say so".

ive had a glance over the communication topic and everything in there seems to make a whole lot more sense and looks alot more interesting to study. more of a "this explains how this works" "....ohh yeah that does makes sense...cool....learning is fun! biology is the w00t!"


anyways, can picking a "bad" option topic be of any disadvantage? i know im only one student in a class of two dozen and everyone has different preferences (e.g the teacher), but i do believe most other students are finding this topic a little harder to grasp than the other standard topics this year, our trial marks for that section of the exam were truely shocking.

 

[DeathB4Life]

anyone?

 

[dagwoman]

I don't have an answer for you, but I was wondering exactly the same thing earlier today.

 

[glitterfairy]

From what I know, the answer is no (unless the entire cohort of a different topic/module scores lower, in which case everyone might get scaled up). Usually the board tries to make the different topic options/modules somewhat "equal" in difficulty level, although students may not feel this is the case (sometimes it can also be related to the teaching ability of the teacher - if they know what they're talking about and can make it interesting, then the students have a higher chance of finding it fun and working harder to undertand it etc)

 

[Ennaybur]

theoretically all topics are created equal. by that logic, if u do shit in a topic and someone else is doing really well in another topic - then u lose.

 

[sinist4]

yea i've never herd of it before lol...i agree that they are all equal