GoldyOrNugget
Señor Member
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2012
- Messages
- 583
- Gender
- Male
- HSC
- 2012
Oh I didn't know about the Dean's Award. I guess that fulfills my criteria for exclusivity.
Still, I don't see how you can compare being in the top 5% of a cohort to achieving a state rank. To get a state rank you have to be in the top 0.1%-0.5%. The top 5% of ASB students almost certainly don't all have 90+ WAMs because that would be a ridiculous grade distribution. You also get 3 shots at the Dean's list as opposed to one shot at the HSC.
You said yourself that 17% of eng students have a DN+ WAM. That's students at the 83rd percentile or above, which is the ATAR equivalent (relative to the cohort) of 83.
I agree that the WAM calculation is broken. Even within a single faculty, different lecturers give marks following different distributions. I don't think WAM should be taken too seriously; like ATAR, it's quite meaningless in the real world.
Still, I don't see how you can compare being in the top 5% of a cohort to achieving a state rank. To get a state rank you have to be in the top 0.1%-0.5%. The top 5% of ASB students almost certainly don't all have 90+ WAMs because that would be a ridiculous grade distribution. You also get 3 shots at the Dean's list as opposed to one shot at the HSC.
You said yourself that 17% of eng students have a DN+ WAM. That's students at the 83rd percentile or above, which is the ATAR equivalent (relative to the cohort) of 83.
I agree that the WAM calculation is broken. Even within a single faculty, different lecturers give marks following different distributions. I don't think WAM should be taken too seriously; like ATAR, it's quite meaningless in the real world.