fayeee said:
what's the difference between aligned mark & scaled mark ? .. or are they the same .... ? lol
Aligned mark is when your mark is altered in accordance to the standards of each individual subject. This is the mark that the Bored of Studies gives you back on your HSC certificate. The BOS decides what raw mark (as in, the actual mark you achieve, like you would receive back on your trials) correlates to a particular performance band. You know, band 5, band 6 etc. They do this because each year, the subject can have different difficulties and using raw marks doesn't say how well you actually did, which is why they don't give us our raw marks.
If you get 65/84 in a 3unit maths exam, the BOS will probably think that it shows a very strong understanding of 3unit maths and it will probably get aligned to 45-46/50, which is what appears on your certificate. Consequently, in an easier subject, you might need a raw mark of say, 85/100 in order to get scaled up to a band 6. These marks are
not used in UAI calculation, but rather indicate how well you did in the subjects.
Scaled marks are the marks they use to calculate your UAI. They look at how well the candidature in one subject performs in every other subject to see how difficult/easy each subject is.
As a simple example, say everybody who does Physics does Chemistry as well and the average is 65 for Physics and 70 for Chemistry. From this, we'd see that a mark of 65 in Physics and a mark of 70 in Chemistry should be worth the same, since students of the same ability should be able to achieve the same mark in any subject they choose. Then, they come up with a scaled mark for every subject and then add the 2 best scaled units of english and the other 8 best units to form an aggregate mark. This aggregate mark is used in order to rank students in their performance across the state which then gives them a UAI.
However, if you predict your UAI using SAM, you would use your aligned marks, which are then converted to scaled marks by SAM in order to give a prediction.