Got this reply from the Senior Assessment Officer @ Board of studies , today:
Dear Daniel,
Your assessment marks are important because they reflect your level of achievement of the outcomes assessed in each course by the tasks set by your school. Your assessment marks also determine your rank.
The reason your assessment marks are moderated by the Office of the Board of Studies is so that direct comparisons can be made between assessment marks awarded by different schools. Schools have students of differing ability, as well as different standards in the difficulty of the tasks and tests they set and in their standards of marking, so it is necessary to adjust all the school assessment marks in each course to a common scale.
The assessment marks for each course in each school are moderated according to the examination performance of the group of students in the school. The moderation process adjusts the assessments submitted by the school so that the mean (or average) of the group’s assessments is set to equal the mean of the examination marks obtained by the students in that group, and so that the top assessment mark is equal to the highest examination mark obtained by a student in the group. The moderation process maintains the rank order of students within their school group.
A useful way of thinking about the moderation process is to view each school group studying a course as earning a total number of examination marks in the examination. The moderation procedures then distribute this total of marks in such a way that the rank order of the students as submitted by the school is not changed. Thus the total of the moderated assessment marks obtained by a school group in a particular course will be the same as the total of the examination marks obtained by that school group, except where some students may have been initially excluded from the moderation process, such as students whose performance in the examination is markedly below what was expected on the basis of their assessments.
I trust this addresses your concerns. Best wishes in your preparation for the HSC.
Regards,
Kate Cameron