Raw vs Aligned marks? (1 Viewer)

[gallen88]

Hi,

This has been one thing that has crossed my mind but I've always been confused about. I've seen many forums where people ask and answer the following question - "raw mark for a band 6 in Chemistry, Physics, Modern, Ancient, SAC, SOR 1/2, English Std/Adv/Ext1, Business, etc.?". I've also looked at the raw mark database website about this. What I'm confused about is whether the raw mark or the aligned mark for the HSC external exam will be used to calculate the overall HSC mark.

I'll use an example with a result Student A achieved for Year 12 HSC Math Ext 2.

If Student A received 89% in the HSC external exam as a raw mark it would be aligned to around 92% (I'm not too sure, just having a bit of a guess as the marks have changed over time on the rawdatabase website). Student A achieved 85/100 as a final internal mark. For their overall HSC mark (internal + external / 2), would Student A's internal mark of 85 be added to the raw external mark (89%) or aligned mark (92%). I'm really confused.

Also I'm really sorry for confusing people with this post too.

Thanks!

 

[D94]

Have you read this? http://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/11-12/hsc/about-HSC/moderation and http://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/11-12/hsc/about-HSC/determining-HSC-results

There are two processes that occur - moderation and aligning. Moderation is performed on your raw school mark. The intent is to adjust your raw school mark to a standard that is comparable to other schools in the state - your school might have easier or harder assessments that others. The actual method has been explained ad nauseam. Briefly, the top raw school mark is set to be equal to the top raw HSC exam mark, and vice versa for the lowest raw school mark. All other marks in between are adjusted to ensure the mean of the newly adjusted set of school marks is equal to the mean of the raw HSC exam marks. The process uses a common marking system across all schools, i.e. the HSC exam. But note that it is not a 1 to 1 mapping of your rank to the rank order of the HSC exam mark. The 5th ranked student does not receive whatever was the 5th highest exam mark. They receive a mark that reflects their position based on their school performance, which is moderated against the school's exam results. A student who is 2% away from first will receive a better adjusted school mark than if they were 20% away from first. The process accounts for small or large differences.

Concurrently, a process of aligning occurs whereby a committee will determine what constitutes a result or performance that is between a Band 5 and Band 6 (which will then be aligned to equal 90), what constitutes a result or performance that is between a Band 4 and Band 5 (which will then be aligned to equal 80) and so on. Both your raw school marks (which are now called the moderated assessment marks) and raw HSC exam marks will be aligned to the standards that were set by the standards committee. It is then those new aligned marks that will be used to determine your final HSC mark, which is simply the average of the reported/aligned moderated assessment marks and reported/aligned HSC exam marks.

Let's say you know your raw mark or want to entertain a potential raw mark, you can then convert this to an aligned mark which will be one of your final two marks that is used to calculate your final HSC mark.

In actual fact, that 85/100 that you mentioned is still a raw school mark so that also needs to undergo aligning. But as discussed, it needs to go through a process of moderation which may increase or decrease that mark to reflect your school's performance in the HSC exams. So it's not as straightforward as averaging that mark along with the aligned HSC exam mark. Have a read of those links because no student in the state should be confused when the information on the processes is freely available.