Alignment and Ranks and what not. (1 Viewer)

[danielemmanuel]

So it is my understanding that band (band 1 to 6) is determined by your aligned marks, which is of course determined by your raw marks. My question is how does ranking play a part in determining my band. And if it does, how would ranking affect me, given that I'm ranked dismally (like 50/60). Also my average raw mark is 43/100, which includes all my internal exams and my external hsc exam (estimated what I got in hsc using the answers that got released).

 

[specificagent1]

external aligned marks make up 50% of your final mark. The other 50% comes from your moderated internal marks which has to do with ranking

 

[jimmysmith560]

As mentioned above, the Assessment Mark is subject to the moderation process, which uses your rank relative to your cohort in a particular subject and an equivalent Examination Mark achieved by any student in your cohort to moderate your Assessment Mark. The moderation process is followed by alignment (which also applies to the Examination Mark). The higher your rank, the higher the Assessment Mark that you can expect. Similarly, the lower your rank, the lower the Assessment Mark that you can expect. This will consequently impact your chances of receiving a mark in a particular band, which is related to alignment. Regarding alignment, each year, HSC markers gather for each subject and discuss what the raw-mark cutoffs should be for the various performance bands. This involves HSC markers observing the achievements required in each band by referring to the student outcomes, abilities required for a band 6, a band 5 and so on, for each exam. For example, they may decide that for one particularly difficult year for HSC Chemistry, a raw mark of 73 or above is a band 6, and 64 to 73 is a band 5, and 57 to 64 is a band 3 and so on.

Based on this, one can infer that ranking and alignment are intertwined, although you can only exert influence over your rank, which is done by doing your utmost to ensure favourable performance in your school-based (internal) assessment tasks/exams.

I hope this helps!

 

[dannyo1]

So it is my understanding that band (band 1 to 6) is determined by your aligned marks, which is of course determined by your raw marks. My question is how does ranking play a part in determining my band. And if it does, how would ranking affect me, given that I'm ranked dismally (like 50/60). Also my average raw mark is 43/100, which includes all my internal exams and my external hsc exam (estimated what I got in hsc using the answers that got released).

Essentially, at the end of your internal assessments your school would have submitted to NESA a raw assessment mark. Now, this mark is not disclosed to you but rather expressed as a rank order. I.e. if there are three students with raw assessment marks 52, 78, 95 the student with 95 would be ranked 1, 78 rank 2 and so on.

Now, NESA locks this raw mark away until after your HSC exam where it gets all of the HSC examination marks of your cohort and calculates the mean. Moderation is where NESA adjusts the mean of your cohort's internal, assessment marks to match the mean of your cohort's external, examination marks. Throughout this moderation process, NESA will retain the rank order of your cohort when determining the moderated, internal assessment mark which therefore means that your rank is crucial as it will determine the moderation of your assessment mark in line with your cohort's HSC performance.

So, at the end of this process, you will have two marks: a raw moderated assessment mark and a raw examination mark, which now have to be aligned!

Jimmy already described the alignment process above so I won't go over it again but I hope I've outlined the relationship between ranking, moderation and hence band performance.