options discrimination? (1 Viewer)

[downcaster]

In my school we're doing quanta, but then I reckon I prefer to do age of silicon more. But honestly from last year only 2% in the state did age of silicon, while nearly 40%? did quanta.

Is that true if less people are doing the option they tend to scale down that section? That's what I heard from my teacher.
Or they treat every option equally?

 

[iambored]

Originally posted by downcaster
Is that true if less people are doing the option they tend to scale down that section? That's what I heard from my teacher.
Or they treat every option equally?

no way, every option is treated equally!

sometimes the uncommon options are the harder ones anyway so they wouldn't be scaled down

 

[BlackJack]

Hmm... they'd have to scale the options section according to how the people performed in the common part of the exam.

So, if Age of Silicon ppl did worse in the rest of the paper and averaged better in the options, their marks (in silicon) willl probably be scaled down.

I think this should be what happens.

Conversely, if the marks in silicon was below what it should be, an increase.

 

[Rahul]

u must be in yr 11 downcaster, rite? coz otherwise u are way behind.

i think bj has got it spot on there.

 

[iambored]

yeah they'd scale them coz some options are harder than others
but i dont see that people are disadvantaged. they don't tend to scale the section down.

 

[Maddogg]

yeah bj is right that wat my teacher and tutor told me

 

[Ragerunner]

Technically the HSC exam option topics are treated equally unless large differences are noticed by the BOS. In that case they will scale some accordingly.

As noted in the Masters report, the issue is not so much whether optional questions are equally difficult but whether students choosing different options are treated fairly in the marking if it is found that those options are not of the same difficulty.

The Board has a routine marks monitoring and adjustment process that looks for any differences in the difficulties of optional questions and identifies cases requiring necessary statistical adjustment to marks.

The process takes into account the performance of each group on the common sections of the paper. Where appropriate, statistical adjustments are then made to the spread of marks for each question.

 

[baby_mulanz]

i reckon Medical Physics would be the best option.. thats the one im doing now and from what i can tell ITS the EASIEST! definately

 

[~TeLEpAtHeTiC~]

geophysics is easy!!.. but finding info on the topic is hard!! we hav to rely on our teacher for everything that we dont know.. THERE ARE NO TEXTBOOKS 4 IT!!.. if ANYONE knows of ANY..let me know asap!!
lol
otherwise..yeah geophysics is straight forward and easy..

 

[Rahul]

hahah well THAT is discrimination.

why on earth would the teacher choose that option then???

 

[Ragerunner]

Teacher's were a bit skeptical about allowing students to do particular option topics if they didn't have the required marks because it was like 40 people wanting to do medical but only allows 25.

One smart guy put down his options as 1)Medical, 2) Age of silicon, 3) Geophysics

He knew those 2 weren't even gonna be picked due to unpopularity. So he got in with a mark of 15/50 while another guy with 23/50 didn't get in lol.

 

[Lazarus]

The options are only scaled to make them equal with the other options - you can't get any advantages out of it.

 

[iambored]

also, i dont know if i wrote this above, but 1. they try and make the qs sorta equally hard, and 2. they do actually mark sections differently, like with shipwrecks (in chem) u need more details that some other options, that's what i was told

 

[Rahul]

no you wont get any advantage, but you will also not be disadvantaged. i'm assuming that the top marks for each option will be 'made to be' the same.