Aligning is basically the transformation of your raw mark (the mark you get in your exam) to your external mark. This is mainly done so that raw marks align with the standards needed to achieve a specific band. For example, for Legal Studies in 2013 they may have determined that if you received a raw mark of 81/100 in the exam, you would have fulfilled the criteria needed to meet the criteria of a borderline band 6 response. In this case, it means that your raw mark of 81 aligns to a 90 external mark since BOS has determined that your exam response meets the standard needed for a band 6 student.
There's also something called options scaling, which basically affects your raw mark. Options scaling has been implemented to cover for the differences in the difficulty of questions (for example, BOS may believe that for a certain year Hamlet was harder than the other text options in mod B, and as a result can add extra marks for the students who answered the Hamlet question).
Now the problem with English Standard is a mix of both these things. If you look at the raw mark database you can see that the options scaling of standard actually subtracts your raw mark. For example, in 2011 there was a person who received a raw mark of 86/105 in Standard English, though after options scaling their mark was reduced to 80 (this mark is called Total weighted mark). This is a different story to English Advanced, where you are awarded marks due to options scaling depending on the difficulty of the question. Using an example from the 2012 HSC, there was a person who received a raw mark of 84/105, though due to options scaling their TWM was 87. So when we see the aligning of the TWM of the Standard English student their aligned mark went to 86, while the English Advanced student had their mark aligned to 90.
It's because of the negative effect options scaling has for standard students and the aligning which doesn't really overly compensate for those negative marks that people on this forum highly recommend others not to pick up Standard.
tl;dr the raw mark you get in the exam gets changed depending on what raw mark bos deems is of band 2/3/4/5/6 standard.
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