Okay well see this depends on a lot of things. For example look at what happened to all my marks for my trial last year:
Raw Mark: 79
Scaled Mark: 90
Rank: 10
see the important thing here was that i was ranked 10th in the exam, which was also my overal rank. So id say its a pretty safe bet that if your school gives you scaled marks then find your overal rank, and compare it to the exam rank scaled mark of your trial. If they take raw marks then, then it all depends on how hard your exams are, because what happens is (so ive been told) the school sends in an estimate of the group in the subject. This estimate covers the ammount of marks that the school thinks you would get as a group.
So if there are say 40 students doing ur subject, the school may say in the hsc exams we expect our group to get 3000 marks. So that means per student your average mark would be 75. This isnt how the marks will be spread because you will have different levels of students from top to bottom. So if you achieve under your 3000 marks as a group then you usually get scaled down, if you achieve over the 3000 marks then those extra marks get distributed amoungst everyone.
So like for me, the school estimated that i would get 91 and my mark was 93 so i got 2 extra marks to give out, my mark ended up 92 so some bastard stole my extra mark lol.
Now the other thing that stuffs this whole process up is if the school completely stuffs up their evaluation (which happened in another subject of mine) then the BOS will change the school marks you are given. So then it depends on how u go in the exam. E.g. If the school puts in a top mark of 87 and the top 5 get band 6's then they will re do the school assesment marks.
Also please not that i dont claim that this info is 100% accurate its only my understanding of how things work from what i could scape from teachers.
My advice would be to just get the best mark possible and not focus on scaling too much.
