If you actually read my post you would see that I came second in PDHPE and I was wondering why my assessment mark of 91 was brought down to 88 when I got 90 for my HSC examination.. p.s. my teacher is a head HSC marker for PDHPE so he wasn't in the slightest bit lenient
Sorry there's two different situations in here and I got really confused then and replied to a different situation (my bad).
First of all, the mark of 91 means absolutely nothing relatively. It could still lead to a moderated assessment mark of 20 or 100. As I said before, all that matters is your rank and the difference between ranks.
What that means is that there was a smaller difference between your exam mark and the exam mark of the person who came first in relative terms compared to the difference between your exam mark and the people ranked below you. Hence it was more appropriate for you to end up with a slightly lower assessment mark.
So yes as you said before, the reason why this happened is because your cohort did not perform too well. If the person ranked above you did slightly better, and the people below you did much better, then you most likely would have received a moderated assessment mark that is higher than what you did end up receiving in the end.