two silly questions (1 Viewer)

[spin spin sugar]

1) does your scaled mark (i.e, what your uai is calculated on) come from the ALIGNED mark or raw mark??

2) okay, in uai seeker you notice that estimates are generally higher for 2001.. lower for 2002... does this mean we can pretty much expect to get lower for 2003?

that is, as far as results/uai's go, does it become more 'difficult' each year to achieve a higher uai? or what? why is it higher one year than the other?

do you think it will be harder this year? does it fluctuate from year to year or is there pretty much a trend happening?

umm i hope i've articulated myself ok, i cant really explain my q'.

 

[Ragerunner]

1) It comes from your raw HSC mark.

2) Really hard to say as these things can vary. But usually each year the candidture seems to get smarter and smarter, and typically harder to gain a higher UAI because it's a rank index which all the really smart people are up the top.

 

[mememe]

I have a question for you - tell me more about alignment! I know that they get your raw HSC mark and align it according to bands etc, but how extreme is the effect it has? is it a matter of 1 or 2 marks, or can it be a huge difference? and is it influenced by how easy or hard the hsc exam was? Any knowledge would be greatly appreciated

 

[Ragerunner]

Would be best to read this.

http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/hsc/hsc_update_2002_06.html

Usually, the harder the exam, the better it is aligned. For subjects like for say SDD, it can have quite high alignment, 10+ marks based on what other people guessed they got as their raw mark, and their aligned mark after.

No one knows for sure how a subject will align. It will change every year.

 

[mememe]

Thankyou. So a mark in the 80's in a hard exam could still become a 90+ band 6 mark. But on the other hand, it could work the opposite way.

 

[Ragerunner]

Typically alignment tends to increase your raw mark. So yeah, getting an 80 as raw could mean a band 6.

No one knows for sure though.

 

[freaking_out]

yeah, 80s raw is surely 90+ aligned for hard subjects such as 4u maths.

 

[spin spin sugar]

arggh so what is the point of aligning marks if it has no bearing on your uai???

 

[Ragerunner]

Not everyone wants to get a UAI.

 

[sugaryblue]

Originally posted by spin spin sugar


2) okay, in uai seeker you notice that estimates are generally higher for 2001.. lower for 2002... does this mean we can pretty much expect to get lower for 2003?

For some depressing reason, I am actually expecting it to be lower this year, even though I wish the scaling to be higher than 2001

 

[Lazarus]

Originally posted by spin spin sugar
arggh so what is the point of aligning marks if it has no bearing on your uai???

It's meant to "give meaning to marks" in the context of the new "standards-referenced" HSC.

Most students seem to take no notice of whatever meaning might be there, though.

 

[spin spin sugar]

Originally posted by sugaryblue
For some depressing reason, I am actually expecting it to be lower this year, even though I wish the scaling to be higher than 2001

likewise. it's depressing thinking that your uai might not be so great this year but if you sat the hsc 2 years ago it would have been slightly more impressive... but i suppose you can't really compare.

Originally posted by Lazarus
It's meant to "give meaning to marks" in the context of the new "standards-referenced" HSC.

Most students seem to take no notice of whatever meaning might be there, though.

...sorry laz

 

[Ragerunner]

Originally posted by spin spin sugar
likewise. it's depressing thinking that your uai might not be so great this year but if you sat the hsc 2 years ago it would have been slightly more impressive... but i suppose you can't really compare.

You'd probably won't do as well considering there were hardly any good textbooks/notes/past papers to help you

But then again, there are heaps of geniuses around

 

[spin spin sugar]

Originally posted by Ragerunner
You'd probably won't do as well considering there were hardly any good textbooks/notes/past papers to help you

But then again, there are heaps of geniuses around

yeah, i dunno about textbooks or notes cos the textbooks i use have been around for years and i tend to use my own notes. but the past papers thing, yeah, exemplar responses definitely help to give you some idea of what markers look for.

nonetheless it is frustrating for me because i repeated year 2 because i was really young and hated it.. and now im all like "oooh i wish i never repeated"... which is stupid i know, something i havent even thought about in ages

 

[mememe]

Ok, so alignment saves you from a crap HSC mark if you came across a hard exam. But what happens with your UAI, if everyone's raw marks are low due to a hard exam? Is scaling down less severe? Or is it just bad luck?

 

[Lazarus]

Originally posted by mememe
Ok, so alignment saves you from a crap HSC mark if you came across a hard exam. But what happens with your UAI, if everyone's raw marks are low due to a hard exam? Is scaling down less severe? Or is it just bad luck?

Originally posted by sepul
What you have to remember is that the UAI is a rank, and the marks are used ( raw marks ) to assign the relative difference between the students

In addition to sepul's comment, I might add that raw marks serve merely as 'placeholders' for your scaled marks. The actual mark itself is of no importance. Your position in the course and the relative differences between you and the other students are the important factors.

If, in a hypothetical course, the raw marks ranged from 10 to 70, and you added 20 to each mark, shifting the range upwards so that it now covers 30 to 90, the rank order and relative differences between students would remain the same. The difficulty of the exam (and hence whether the raw marks were, on average, high or low) becomes irrelevant.

 

[mememe]

Originally posted by Lazarus


If, in a hypothetical course, the raw marks ranged from 10 to 70, and you added 20 to each mark, shifting the range upwards so that it now covers 30 to 90, the rank order and relative differences between students would remain the same. The difficulty of the exam (and hence whether the raw marks were, on average, high or low) becomes irrelevant.

But what about compared to other subjects? the relative distance between you and everyone in your course would remain the same, however if the exam was particularly hard then the canditure as a whole would of performed poorly compared to another course which this year had an easy exam. Does that mean the harder exam course is scaled down less than the easy one?

 

[Lazarus]

Before any scaling processes occur, each distribution of raw marks is standardised to a mean of 25 and SD of 12 (on a 1-unit basis). Any skewing that might have occurred due to lenient or harsh marking, or due to an easy or hard exam paper, is removed, and is removed from every single course.