Hi thank you for replying! How different would you say the marks we receive from NESA are compared to the raw marks used for the ATAR. Sorry if this a confusing question but I’ve seen students put in their hsc marks that NESA gave them, which I assume are the aligned marks you said, into the ATAR calculator but since they are aligned marks wouldnt they give u a higher atar estimate than the real ATAR with the raw marks That are normally lower according to rawmarks.info?
No worries! Importantly, keep in mind that the data available on rawmarks.info includes raw and aligned HSC exam marks. It does not include data related to Assessment Marks and by extension does not provide information in relation to HSC marks (final marks).
To answer your question, raw and aligned HSC exam marks are different, and their difference varies between subjects. For example, a raw HSC exam mark of 82 in English Standard could result in an aligned mark of 85, whereas the same raw HSC exam mark in English Advanced could result in an aligned mark of 89, i.e. a higher mark.
UAC uses scaled HSC marks to calculate students' ATARs. The value of scaled HSC marks is typically lower than both raw and aligned HSC marks. With that being said, I believe that ATAR calculators have some type of mechanism that takes the difference between raw and aligned HSC marks (the latter being the marks that students input into ATAR calculators as you mentioned, also see idkkdi's post above) into consideration when providing ATAR estimates to students, which would be consistent with the fact that they have a degree of accuracy. For instance, based on my aligned HSC marks, the Matrix ATAR calculator gave me a 91.90, whereas my actual ATAR ended up being slightly higher at 92.10.