Sorry to be a pain, but..... (1 Viewer)

[moving on]

I just need clarification on something.

First of all I want to say a huge thanks to Cyph for explaining how the rankings/marks go. I was really confused until last night when I read it and then finally it made sense.

Anyway, I just need clarification on the following question.

Say, I am ranked 7th in my advanced English class, but hypothetically speaking I got the highest HSC exam mark. I would keep that mark, but as I am ranked 7th, the I would get the 7th highest HSC exam mark from my group as my assessment mark, and my english HSC mark would then be the average of these two.

Is this correct??

Thanks.

 

[Ragerunner]

Yes, except your assessment mark will not be exactly equal to the 7th highest. It should be pretty close though.

 

[moving on]

Sorry to be a real pain again, BUT why wouldn't my assesment mark be exactly equal to the 7th highest mark?

Sorry if this is a really dumb question, I'm just curious.

 

[Ragerunner]

Read this.

http://users.on.net/unix/HSCmarks.pdf

You will see in their example, that the corresponding mark to that rank will not be exactly that mark. 7th highest for you would probably be the closest thing to say without getting very technical.

Could explain further but you should read that document again more carefully.

 

[flyin']

It depends on the number of people doing that subject in your school and the relative gaps in the assessment marks, which means that it may not even be close to the 7th highest mark. Maybe I shouldn't have posted this... because you might now be more confused than before.

 

[walla]

For assessment marks, the first-ranked person gets the highest exam mark and the last-ranked person gets the last exam mark (and possibly the median rank gets the median exam mark? not sure about that one).
However not all of the marks in the middle are allocated that easily.
I like to think of it in terms of the BOS taking all of your schools marks, putting them into one big pool that adds up to a total mark and reallocating them. When they do that reallocating, though, they take into account the spacing between assessment marks as well as the ranks.

So consider the case where the first person gets 98 and the second person gets 97.5...and assume there are a few other people doing the course. Then if in the exam, the top mark is 98 and the second top mark is 85 and then there are some other marks. Then the first person will get 98 but the second person won't get 85, they will get a mark much closer to 98 (though probably not 97.5) to reflect the closeness of the assessment marks. Of course, that mark, say its 95, is then averaged with their exam mark, which was probably the 85, to get an HSC mark of 90.

Hope that helps!!

 

[Lazarus]

walla's explanation was quite good.

You need to also remember that the relative differences between the raw assessment marks are used, and not the relative differences between the exam marks.

Your moderated assessment mark will only be similar (or equal to) the exam mark of the same rank if the relative differences between the exam marks are similar (or equal to) the relative differences between the raw assessment marks.

It is not uncommon for the distribution of exam marks for a class to vary from the distribution of raw assessment marks.