y dont they ever reveal raw marks? (1 Viewer)

[bos1234]

.

 

[timobr0]

one reason would be because it makes the system not look as good as they make it out to be

edit: particularly for english

 

[ari89]

and because they don't love us enough...they'd prefer we think we got 90 instead of telling us the truth that we only got 81

 

[Sprinkles~]

Obviously they don't want us (and the rest of the country) to know how badly we really went, duh

 

[Testpilot]

It looks better for the government if everyone gets higher marks. A teacher at our school said that for the school certificate to make it look better the actual raw marks were divided by 2 and then added to 50. So a raw mark of 80 would become a mark of 90. While this doesn't apply to the HSC it shows why we don't get back raw marks.

And I am aware that the teacher may be wrong.

 

[A l]

There is the political reason of censorship (as described above) and also that raw marks are basically meaningless to us in terms of mapping out abilities because they vary according to the difficulty of an exam. Aligning is done to ensure standards are comparable between years. In other words an aligned mark of 90 in one course last year should be equivalent to an aligned mark of 90 in the same course this year. However the raw mark for that same standardised mark last year may have been say 75 and this year it may have been 80 due to differences in difficulty. Therefore aligned marks roughly eliminate the differences in difficulty in exams. Raw marks would be not be an accurate indicator of achievement and ability.
Also, I guess they do not reveal raw marks also because they do not want you to deduce correlations between raw marks and scaled marks where outrageous conclusions and theories arise thus influencing the choices of future students. If raw marks were revealed then interpolation can be done, using Table A3 released by the UAC annually, to deduce the extent of how much a mark was scaled for each course. Hence, theories would arise such as one should not take a particular course because a raw mark of X in this course becomes scaled down to an unspeakably low mark so then you would end up with students being influenced to take courses they are not suited to just because they are "scaled up".

 

[cem]

There is the political reason of censorship (as described above) and also that raw marks are basically meaningless to us in terms of mapping out abilities because they vary according to the difficulty of an exam. Aligning is done to ensure standards are comparable between years. In other words an aligned mark of 90 in one course last year should be equivalent to an aligned mark of 90 in the same course this year. However the raw mark for that same standardised mark last year may have been say 75 and this year it may have been 80 due to differences in difficulty. Therefore aligned marks roughly eliminate the differences in difficulty in exams. Raw marks would be not be an accurate indicator of achievement and ability.
Also, I guess they do not reveal raw marks also because they do not want you to deduce correlations between raw marks and scaled marks where outrageous conclusions and theories arise thus influencing the choices of future students. If raw marks were revealed then interpolation can be done, using Table A3 released by the UAC annually, to deduce the extent of how much a mark was scaled for each course. Hence, theories would arise such as one should not take a particular course because a raw mark of X in this course becomes scaled down to an unspeakably low mark so then you would end up with students being influenced to take courses they are not suited to just because they are "scaled up".

That is very well put.

The exercise is called STANDARD SETTING for that very reason - to ensure that the standards set in the Performance Descriptor Bands mean the same thing from one year to the next.

This was the reason for changing to Standards referenced rather than norm referenced (where the cohort was scaled to a mean of 60 and a standard deviation of 15). That system only allowed 1% or so in each course to get over 90 whereas now, if you reach the standard set by the performance bands then you can get over 90.

The real issue for me is why they set the minimum acceptable standard at 50 as this is why the scaling can be soooooooooooooo high. If the bands were 15 marks apart (i.e. Band 6 = 85 and not 90) then the scaling wouldn't need to be so great, particularly at the lower end where marks in the low 20s can go to 50 in some subjects.

 

[cem]

It looks better for the government if everyone gets higher marks. A teacher at our school said that for the school certificate to make it look better the actual raw marks were divided by 2 and then added to 50. So a raw mark of 80 would become a mark of 90. While this doesn't apply to the HSC it shows why we don't get back raw marks.

And I am aware that the teacher may be wrong.

No 'may' about it. That teacher is wrong with the method.

The aligning for the SC is done exactly the same way as for the HSC. Having been of the aligning (judging) team for Modern History I have been in the room where the team have been doing the subjects for the SC at times and they attended the same trainging days that I did in those years.

 

[Testpilot]

No 'may' about it. That teacher is wrong with the method.

The aligning for the SC is done exactly the same way as for the HSC. Having been of the aligning (judging) team for Modern History I have been in the room where the team have been doing the subjects for the SC at times and they attended the same trainging days that I did in those years.

As I said i was just going off what I've been told by my teacher, but thanks for correcting me.