jk i'm stupid I meant 4 terms lol, got mixed up. Y11 is 3 terms
your
assessment/internal mark is the mark that goes on your end of year report card, yeah?
your
exam/external mark is just the mark that you get when you sit the actual hsc exam
both of these marks may be slightly altered for many reasons, which include:
- you did significantly better or worse in one or the other (so if your internal mark is 90 but in the exam/external you get 60 then they will lower your internal mark to like 80 lol or around that, no one really knows to what extent (but for example I saw my internal mark for Modern History on my report card and it was 89. nek minnet I get my results and I screwed the exam and got around 70 which is my fault, but then they bring my internal mark of 89 that I earned to 77 and whilst it isn't fair in some cases, it weeds out kids that got marked too easily in school and so there is no use complaining about it.)
- the difficulty of the subject (getting an 80 in physics is more important than getting an 80 in retail services)
- results of your year group (this to me is the one thing I think is actually fucked up, but yeah if you're not ranked 1st in your class then your hsc results
could be positively
or negatively affected by their marks)
- results of the state (so if everyone performed poorly in say the pdhpe exam they might boost everyone's marks a little bit to compensate, because it was a particularly hard exam that year. and vice versa - if the exam was way easy and everyone smashed it, they might slightly reduce everyone's marks)
- I'm sure there are a few more but that's the gist of it
These alterations of marks can be known as aligning, moderating and scaling. All 3 are slightly different but for the sake of your newbieness (I mean that in a nice way I promise haha) they are all the same thing for now. When you get to year 12 then worry about the tiny details.
After these alterations, BOSTES (the board of studies) takes your final altered internal and external mark and just averages them and this is your final hsc mark
so for that stupid modern history haha my final exam was 72 and my final internal was 77 so my official final hsc mark was 75.
AND THENNNN omg lol and then UAC (the body that deals with uni applications) takes those final marks and does a bit of altering (for some of the reasons that I listed above above) and does some more math and BAM you have your ATAR