"a higher uai suggests greater chance of succeeding at uni." (1 Viewer)

[darkwolfzx]

i love this thread so much. The views are sky high

 

[wrong_turn]

i have to slightly agree that a person with a uai of 60 will do just as well in uni as the person who gets 99.
as several people have suggested, there is still a relationship between those people who get a high uai for their particualr course and the calibre of marks they get at uni.

everyone places an emphasis that the hsc is rubbish and that it is all about memorising essays. in many ways uni is similar and not too different from the hsc. it still requires memorisation, just that memorisation does not always get you top marks though it definately helps. uni requires a combination of intelligence for application of concepts and also memorisation of the theory for you to apply the concepts in the first place.

so no i do not agree that a person with a uai of 60 can succeed as much as the person with 99 if they were in the same course with the same cut-off. of course there will be anomalies, but like i said, the general scenario is that the high achievers will continue to be high achievers in an academic situation.

 

[AsyLum]

everyone places an emphasis that the hsc is rubbish and that it is all about memorising essays. in many ways uni is similar and not too different from the hsc. it still requires memorisation, just that memorisation does not always get you top marks though it definately helps. uni requires a combination of intelligence for application of concepts and also memorisation of the theory for you to apply the concepts in the first place.

While I won't discount that memorisation plays a part, university learning and high school learning are substantially different, but this is dependent on which area of study you go to. I'd hedge a bet that the more structured degrees will possess more of a linear approach, whereas those with only coherencies as their path, will be substantially more lateral in their approach.

In the Humanities field for example, I've found that the difference is in ticking off boxes (HSC) vs actually formulating logical arguments and backing them up in a strong theoretical/academic approach.

so no i do not agree that a person with a uai of 60 can succeed as much as the person with 99 if they were in the same course with the same cut-off. of course there will be anomalies, but like i said, the general scenario is that the high achievers will continue to be high achievers in an academic situation.

But as you have said, the people who achieve these type of 60UAI>HD GPA are more anomalies than the rule, but they do exist for several reasons.

 

[KFunk]

Bravo trolls, you've done it again.

What's wrong with betting on both. Just because there is 39 UAI ranks between them, doesn't simply mean one will succeed 'more' and the other simply won't succeed. What's stopping the person with UAI 60 from entering a course in university with the same cutoff rank and that they enjoy immensely, and succeeding in that course?!?

UAI doesn't mean a thing when it comes to university (except entry)! And I'm sure that people at uni couldn't care less about other people's UAIs.

Think of it this way: Suppose you have a sample of 400 students with UAIs ranging 95-100, and 400 students with UAIs ranging 75-80, with each group studying a comparable range of courses.

Would you expect a (statistically significant) difference in the proportion achieving HD's between the two groups?

 

[Enteebee]

I don't know I think I'd need to see some studies on it. It is possible that the HSC does not prepare you at all for university and thus is of little / nil effect.

 

[Omium]

What's wrong with betting on both. Just because there is 39 UAI ranks between them, doesn't simply mean one will succeed 'more' and the other simply won't succeed. What's stopping the person with UAI 60 from entering a course in university with the same cutoff rank and that they enjoy immensely, and succeeding in that course?!?

UAI doesn't mean a thing when it comes to university (except entry)! And I'm sure that people at uni couldn't care less about other people's UAIs.

Oh wow, Way to go off on a tangent.

I repeat, if you had $50 000 to bet would you put it on the 99 UAI student or 60UAI student?

End of story.

On AVERAGE higher UAI people will do better that LOW UAI people

 

[Enteebee]

Sure at the margins I'd say on average your 99 will beat your 60 uai... we can be certain of that. But is the HSC discriminative enough to pick up the difference in ability between someone who gets 88uai and 95uai? I don't know, I'd need to see studies... It'd be hard though because people with higher uai's will usually be in more competitive courses.

 

[omniscience]

um, no.

i'd almost argue the opposite. if i worked to get an insane uai, i'd probs burn out and just not care next year. alternately i'd not care coz a 100 would boost my ego to the point that i'd... not care.

People who have the tendency to burn out after a prolonged period of working, would have burnt out before they even did the HSC tasks. It's unlikely that people who haven't burnt out for a year will suddenly burn out after HSC.

 

[wrong_turn]

enteebee lets put it this way.

let us currently assume that all unversity courses are equally the same difficulty. now let us realise that the person who attains the higher uai will have either worked harder in high school, was more intelligent subject to what they studied or a combination of both.

if we placed the student who gains a 60 uai into a law degree with a cohert of students averaging a uai of 99, what are the chances that the course studied will be harder?
the chances that the course will be harder is quite high. if it were too easy, everyone will be aceing the course and it must be realised that in uni they can't let everyone pass unless it can be justified. the course therefore must be made a lot more challenging to create a greater dispersion of marks for the students completing the course. therefore it might be on average, more likely that the student with a uai of 60 may struggle to attain higher marks in comparison to this cohert.

i hope this answers the question of another degree being harder than the other and varied success of students with higher uai.

note: some degrees, especially engineering courses are just GG hahaha

 

[spence]

enteebee lets put it this way.

let us currently assume that all unversity courses are equally the same difficulty. now let us realise that the person who attains the higher uai will have either worked harder in high school, was more intelligent subject to what they studied or a combination of both.

if we placed the student who gains a 60 uai into a law degree with a cohert of students averaging a uai of 99, what are the chances that the course studied will be harder?
the chances that the course will be harder is quite high. if it were too easy, everyone will be aceing the course and it must be realised that in uni they can't let everyone pass unless it can be justified. the course therefore must be made a lot more challenging to create a greater dispersion of marks for the students completing the course. therefore it might be on average, more likely that the student with a uai of 60 may struggle to attain higher marks in comparison to this cohert.

i hope this answers the question of another degree being harder than the other and varied success of students with higher uai.

note: some degrees, especially engineering courses are just GG hahaha

This doesn't really address the argument though. You're just saying that a law degree must be harder because the ones with the 99 UAIs will do better at uni, where the whole point of this thread is that we don't know whether they do better or not.

 

[wrong_turn]

spence haha your right...i lost my trail of thought half way through my response =)

but my point i think was that with a higer calibre of students in a course...the harder assessments become to challenge those high calibre students. or else everyone will be doing too well and they might scale it accordingly.

so that means depending on the required uai for the course and the uai the student gets, creates a situation that they should on average do better than average in the course if they had a higher uai than the cut off by a lot or a little.

 

[AsyLum]

enteebee lets put it this way.

let us currently assume that all unversity courses are equally the same difficulty. now let us realise that the person who attains the higher uai will have either worked harder in high school, was more intelligent subject to what they studied or a combination of both.

This entire premise is based on a very fundamental flaw: no course is equal or standardised. The very existence of scaling and all those other formulae are testament to this.

The biggest issue going into university is that you are required to use differing skills in order to achieve success. While one person may excel at being an all-rounder, uni courses tend to be more specific, and can skew and heighten certain areas of expertise.

What a UAI SHOULD illustrate is the ability to apply one's self to work, despite the like/dislike of courses. Creative industries/courses continue to suffer, by having people who are obviously not creative or on the flipside creative but unable to achieve the UAI. While it may work for more process-skilled courses, the humanities (and by this I mean social science, law, arts, etc) based courses are less inclined to need people who regurgitate formulae or concepts.

 

[Cookie182]

I don't really think there is any empirical way of correlating the statement, even though I am in general agreeance with it. No current statistical data exists which tracks the university performance of HSC students, which would allow us to make comparisons. And then there is the problem of relative course difficultness. However, the specific statement can not be answerd simply because at it's core it asks for subjective reasoning- there is no objective and thorough definition of 'success'. Perhaps as it was noted earlier, completion would be the better phrase.

Ignoring university, a debate which ive seen on here many a times before has been is there really any difference purely between intelligence and UAI's. Obviously, with 50 and 99 it is a better bet that the person has a harder work ethic etc and is MOST likely smarter. However, what about 97 and 99. If the person who got 99 just has a strong memory and aced say modern/ancient history ie HSC marks of 99 and maintained low 90's in other 'easier' subjects and the person who got 97 did 4 Unit maths, physics but didn't score as high, there is definately a chance that they can be more intelliget then the person who got 99.

Hence, as law is mentioned a lot. Law at UOW for eg has a cutoff of 90, with people getting on 87+. It is not uncommon that kids who are very strong at comprehension and writing and who have a UAI in high 80's can beat kids who scored 99, usually because the 99 kid lacks interest and may have trouble adjusting to the more 'free-thinking' approach as opposed to them choosing and aceing maths/physics subjecs but then choosing Law for the prestige.

To truley mesaure this, we would have to eliminate these outlying events and make the assumption that everyone is rational in their course selection, has perfect course knowledge and enters into the course they truly do preference over anyhing else (ignoring influences, prestige etc etc). That way, kids who were very bright and math aces would choose prob engineering and hence would not cause these discrepancies by entering say Law. This is all based on generalisation, but if two kids DID share the same academic interests, ie the 87 UAI kid above and now a 99 UAI kid who was also interested in written areas- aced 4 U English, History Extension, Modern, Legal, Latin etc etc then i think its fair to say the 99 UAI kid would fair better, on average, over the course of the tertiary cycle.

 

[KFunk]

Some evidence of sorts: -

From (Barry & Chapman, 2007) - Predicting university performance

"Since university admissions are usually based on TER, we looked at final performance in semester 1 at university by TER, as illustrated in figure 2. As expected, there is a positive relationship between TER and final results, but with a R² value of only 26.8%... This is expected since TER includes other, non-mathematical subjects, in its calculation." [Note, the study looked at the performance of students, drawn from all Aus states, in science and engineering degrees]

From (Nolan & Ahmadi-Esfahani, 2007) - Predicting performance in undergraduate agricultural economics

"UAI was the most strongly significant predictor of performance, with P-values of approximately zero, and a t-statistic greater than 10 for Agricultural Economics and for Economics 1, and six for Econometrics. A student’s mathematics mark was significant for all three core units, as was the dummy variable for 2 Unit mathematics. The standardised coefficients for UAI were, respectively, 0.48 for Agricultural Economics and for Economics 1, and 0.33 for Econometrics, whereas those for mathematics ranged from 0.13 for Economics to 0.28 for Econometrics. Those for independent schools ranged from 0.13 to 0.16. UAI was confirmed as the most important predictor of success"

From (Cooney) - The tertiary entrance rank - an endangered species?

"Although a meta-analysis of prediction studies is difficult because of the lack of comparability of the applicant pool and outcome measures, there is general agreement (Dobson, 1999) that a TER does predict first year performance reasonably well. When allowance is made for truncation of the TER, approximately 50-60% of the variability in first year performance as assessed by GPA can be explained by variability in the TER (Cooney, 1974, 1975). The predictive validity varies across different areas with, not surprisingly, highest validity in science based faculties because of the continuity of content between final year at school and first year university."

 

[wrong_turn]

i actually understand what is being said there....

 

[Cookie182]

Some evidence of sorts: -

From (Barry & Chapman, 2007) - Predicting university performance

"Since university admissions are usually based on TER, we looked at final performance in semester 1 at university by TER, as illustrated in figure 2. As expected, there is a positive relationship between TER and final results, but with a R² value of only 26.8%... This is expected since TER includes other, non-mathematical subjects, in its calculation." [Note, the study looked at the performance of students, drawn from all Aus states, in science and engineering degrees]

From (Nolan & Ahmadi-Esfahani, 2007) - Predicting performance in undergraduate agricultural economics

"UAI was the most strongly significant predictor of performance, with P-values of approximately zero, and a t-statistic greater than 10 for Agricultural Economics and for Economics 1, and six for Econometrics. A student’s mathematics mark was significant for all three core units, as was the dummy variable for 2 Unit mathematics. The standardised coefficients for UAI were, respectively, 0.48 for Agricultural Economics and for Economics 1, and 0.33 for Econometrics, whereas those for mathematics ranged from 0.13 for Economics to 0.28 for Econometrics. Those for independent schools ranged from 0.13 to 0.16. UAI was confirmed as the most important predictor of success"

From (Cooney) - The tertiary entrance rank - an endangered species?

"Although a meta-analysis of prediction studies is difficult because of the lack of comparability of the applicant pool and outcome measures, there is general agreement (Dobson, 1999) that a TER does predict first year performance reasonably well. When allowance is made for truncation of the TER, approximately 50-60% of the variability in first year performance as assessed by GPA can be explained by variability in the TER (Cooney, 1974, 1975). The predictive validity varies across different areas with, not surprisingly, highest validity in science based faculties because of the continuity of content between final year at school and first year university."

Oh well that completely destroys my statement

Did you just do a quick google search?

 

[Omium]

Some evidence of sorts: -

From (Barry & Chapman, 2007) - Predicting university performance

"Since university admissions are usually based on TER, we looked at final performance in semester 1 at university by TER, as illustrated in figure 2. As expected, there is a positive relationship between TER and final results, but with a R² value of only 26.8%... This is expected since TER includes other, non-mathematical subjects, in its calculation." [Note, the study looked at the performance of students, drawn from all Aus states, in science and engineering degrees]

From (Nolan & Ahmadi-Esfahani, 2007) - Predicting performance in undergraduate agricultural economics

"UAI was the most strongly significant predictor of performance, with P-values of approximately zero, and a t-statistic greater than 10 for Agricultural Economics and for Economics 1, and six for Econometrics. A student’s mathematics mark was significant for all three core units, as was the dummy variable for 2 Unit mathematics. The standardised coefficients for UAI were, respectively, 0.48 for Agricultural Economics and for Economics 1, and 0.33 for Econometrics, whereas those for mathematics ranged from 0.13 for Economics to 0.28 for Econometrics. Those for independent schools ranged from 0.13 to 0.16. UAI was confirmed as the most important predictor of success"

From (Cooney) - The tertiary entrance rank - an endangered species?

"Although a meta-analysis of prediction studies is difficult because of the lack of comparability of the applicant pool and outcome measures, there is general agreement (Dobson, 1999) that a TER does predict first year performance reasonably well. When allowance is made for truncation of the TER, approximately 50-60% of the variability in first year performance as assessed by GPA can be explained by variability in the TER (Cooney, 1974, 1975). The predictive validity varies across different areas with, not surprisingly, highest validity in science based faculties because of the continuity of content between final year at school and first year university."

 

[Omnidragon]

UAI obviously has nothing to do with success. Most people I know with good UAIs end up selling hot dogs at KFC.

 

[NorthRiversMatt]

You need attitude and industry to gain position in universities when you are over the target rank.

 

[Captain Gh3y]

You need attitude and industry to gain position in universities when you are over the target rank.

u also need to stay single, or else our country will end up like iraq or kenya