Hello.
Originally posted by BlackJack
What happens in the early and the prelim?
"Offers in these two rounds are generally made to applicants who have deferred, applicants who are selected predominantly on criteria other than Australia Year 12, and international fee-paying applicants. Only applicants that are made an offer will be sent a letter. If you do not receive an offer in the Early Round or the Preliminary round do not contact UAC. You will be considered in the Main Round." (p24, UAC Guide)
You shouldn't have to worry about those rounds, unless there's something special about your courses.
Originally posted by BlackJack
Do they contact you sometime as well and try to convince you to change your preference to first, if you're good enough (I know wollongong tried that last year to a friend)?
I don't see why they would do that... the order in which you list your preferences doesn't affect your chances of getting an offer. However, if you've done particularly well (as in anomaly's example) then yes quite often the universities will contact you directly.
Originally posted by saladsugery
and also, how do you know so much about all this hsc/scaling/uai/bos/uac stuff? it's a bit, ermmm, unnatural?
lol.
I realised in Year 11 that I knew nothing about this whole HSC thing... and that nobody else did either. I was actually looking for a loophole to exploit heh. So I just started collecting bits of info and so on. Everyone had their own opinion of how the system worked, and gradually, after talking to a few different people who are 'sure', you can piece together the common elements. I didn't really have any verification until this year when I found out that my statistics tutor at uni is a member of the Technical Committee on Scaling.
With regard to HSC/UAC/BOS info... a lot of it can be found quite easily if one is willing to do a little research. Google is your friend.