A question about alignment (1 Viewer)

[announ]

Could it be because of distribution? Or does the lower end 'taper' off really quickly? 'Aligned mark' does only refer to the exam, right?

I recently checked rawmarks.info and I compared the band 6 cutoff for 4u maths. In 2017 it was 77. I asked someone I knew for a similar year. 2020 and they said it was 78? I think? Anyway, I found it odd that for such a miniscule difference for band 6 that 66 aligned to 79.2 in 2020 while in 2017, 58 went to 85. Does this happen because of how densely students pack around a certain mark range?

 

[Jojofelyx]

Could it be because of distribution? Or does the lower end 'taper' off really quickly? 'Aligned mark' does only refer to the exam, right?

I recently checked rawmarks.info and I compared the band 6 cutoff for 4u maths. In 2017 it was 77. I asked someone I knew for a similar year. 2020 and they said it was 78? I think? Anyway, I found it odd that for such a miniscule difference for band 6 that 66 aligned to 79.2 in 2020 while in 2017, 58 went to 85. Does this happen because of how densely students pack around a certain mark range?

Precisely. So many students sit these exams that it just becomes a normal distribution pretty much. A big bell curve, so yeah, very densely packed students around a certain mark range