If school performance only affects alignment (which is only used in the HSC results) and only raw marks are used for ATAR, where does school ranking come into ATAR?
If someone goes to a school where it's really hard to be rank 1 (like James Ruse or smth) and they're ranked 40/100, does that affect their ATAR when that raw mark (and rank) is submitted?
Okay as mentioned I think you are getting mixed up between the terminology and hence the confusion.
School performance (in terms of the total and distribution of HSC marks for each subject) does
affect the "moderated assessment mark" but NOT the exam mark.
In terms of what matters to you :
HSC mark = (exam mark + moderated assessment mark)/2
1.
Exam mark(HSC exam raw mark to exam mark = alignment ) is
independent of the school performance. It's only determined by your performance in the final HSC exam(hence the name exam mark). Your raw mark on the final HSC exam gets
aligned to an exam mark e.g 66% raw mark in maths extension 2 in 2023 HSC gets aligned to 90 exam mark (
https://rawmarks.info/mathematics/mathematics-extension-2/ ). It does NOT matter whether that person who scored 66% is from no 1 school or 200th school.
Also note your school trial marks may not necessarily reflect that 66% -> 90 mark mapping as it can be more difficult or easier than actual HSC.
2. Your
moderated assessment mark (moderation) is
dependent on your school performance in their exam marks. You can refer to the additional links for further information but in short:
your moderated assessment mark is your 'share' of the pool of exam marks of your cohort based on your ranking. E.g. if you are ranked 1st at your school you'd get the top exam mark value(which may or may not be scored by you) as your moderated assessment mark.
Theoretically it shouldn't make too much difference between schools as if you go a top ranked school the pool of exam marks is higher but you might be ranked lower where as at a lower ranked school the pool of exams marks is lower but you may have a higher rank.
Practically it may differ a bit in a few scenarios such as but not limited to:
a) If you go to a top ranked school the assessment may be extremely difficult and some people may perform badly in those but better at actual HSC difficulty. Hence those people may get a lower assessment mark but higher exam mark.
b) If you go to a lower ranked school when the performance is unstable and cohort is small. Then if somehow you messed up some assessment and get ranked 2nd internally and assume you got the top exam mark in HSC say 95 but your school's 2nd exam mark is only 83. Then for your assessment mark you'd get the 2nd highest exam mark which is only 83. Then your HSC mark is (95+83)/2=89
c) When the marking criteria is quite different between school assessment and HSC exam. This happens more often in highly subjective subjects such as English extension 2. That way there could be a huge gap between HSC mark and assessment for some of the candidates and hence creating advantage for some and 'unfair' for others.
3. So far scaling was never mentioned yet. Note:
HSC mark= the average of
exam mark(alignment): raw HSC exam mark to aligned exam mark
and
assessment mark(moderation): your 'shared' of your school's pool of exam marks based on your ranking)
The process of turning
HSC mark into
scaled mark is called
scaling. See 'uac table A3' for scaling of each subject.
The
total scaled mark of your best 10 units (English must be included) is called
aggregate (out of 500) and then aggregate determines the
ATAR. See 'uac table A9' for the aggregate and ATAR table
There are some additional resources you can refer to for further information:
How does one get a specific mark in the HSC for a subject? Is it based on individual performance in the HSC or is it based on ranking and school performance?
boredofstudies.org
Know how HSC marks are calculated? Read this guide to learn the details of how your HSC mark is calculated.
www.matrix.edu.au
Everything about raw marks, assessment marks, HSC marks and scaled marks explained!
scienceready.com.au