Thanks for that - Sorry but I still am a bit confused as there isn't anything that mentions ranks. If you have the time could you please tell me what happens with an example?
Eg: I get an 80 raw in the English Advanced HSC exam and ranked 17/69 internally - what happens now in terms of both HSC and ATAR.
Tysm
thanks - that clarifies things up a bit
So you sure that 17th mark I get for my internal 50% be an aligned mark not raw mark?
Also, what role does that ‘cohort strength’ factor play in this, and what happens if I’m sharing rank 17 with 6 other people?
It's hard to walk through it with an example because you need an entire cohort's marks to illustrate it properly, otherwise I'll just be pulling numbers out of nowhere that will be inaccurate.
0) Starting points
- You raw exam mark (e.g. raw 80 in English Advanced)
- Your raw internal assessment mark (i.e. whatever final mark you got internally before moderation kicks in for your 17th rank)
1) Moderation
Your raw internal assessment mark needs to be moderated because every school sets different standards so there needs to be some way to bring everyone approximately onto a common scale with the state. We look to the external exam marks as the reference point.
For example, if your school's average raw internal assessment mark is 60 but their average raw external mark is 70 then that suggests that the school's internal assessments are harder than that of external HSC so that average is adjusted upwards from 60 to match with the 70 (this is the whole "cohort strength" thing people refer to).
Now obviously there is a distribution of marks around that average and that distribution also has to be preserved. How do you preserve the distribution of marks? By trying to preserve the ranks and distance between ranks which is implied by your raw assessment mark - this is the moderation "formula" that was shared in the earlier posts.. Think of it as shifting the mean of a normal distribution bell curve of internal marks to match the mean of the external marks, but trying to preserve the variance of the internal marks.
2a) Alignment
Once the above is done then the alignment process takes place which maps your raw external exam mark + your moderated internal mark to an aligned mark based on some standards set by NESA for each subject. This is done to account for any variations in difficulty between different years. Note that this step happens
independently of scaling for your ATAR which is done by UAC. This becomes the HSC marks you see on your report.
2b) Scaling
The raw HSC mark is then calculated as the average of your raw external exam mark + your moderated internal mark. This is then scaled which tries to take into account the differences between subjects. Basically, if in subject A's cohort is stronger than subject B's cohort on average then subject A's scaled average should be higher than subject B's scaled average. How do we determine this relativity? Based on their performance in other subjects outside of A and B (which is a complex algorithm). This ultimately feeds into the ATAR calculation.
