The point is that it shouldn't cost 'a lot'. Reasonable cost recovery is fine, but it certainly should not cost this much for mere access to raw marks.
Read the ombudsman's report. You'll see why freedom of information and transparency of government processes is so essential. This is why it is vital that raw marks are offered on no more than a cost basis. It is clear that the Board is using cost to disuade students from exercising their rights to this information.
It's all about students having confidence that their results are accurate and transparency in how their results were arrived at. Otherwise the system is a 'black box' and you are forced to trust BOS 100%.
'Without the information..., no student or their representative is able to independently verify that the final marks a student is awarded are correct. They have no ability to independently scrutinise how a student’s final marks were calculated. '
"The OBOS scans into its system approximately 40 million individual marks in relation to students each year. There are numerous opportunities for something to go wrong. Parts of the process are performed by people; other parts involve computer manipulations of numerical information. No matter how robust the OBOS’s internal quality assurance processes, genuine errors and corruption are still possible, during any part of the process, but without transparency, no one outside the Board would be able to independently identify errors or even corruption'
"No student currently has enough information available to them to fully understand how the final results are produced. Changing the system so that those who wish to understand are given all of the information they need, will give ‘meaning’ to their raw marks and give clarity to their final results. Students benefit from having a better understanding of the process. The Board benefits from students being more confident in the reliability of the process and being able to appreciate how much care and thought has gone into its development."
"For the HSC to be effective, the students must have confidence in the system. Students engaging in this so-called ‘campaign’ are actually doing nothing more than wanting to understand why they were awarded their final results. For the reasons I have outlined, students should be given sufficient information to gain such an understanding. This does not seem too much to ask.."