u-borat said:
yeah im confused because according to sam and others, when you put in 90 for example for latin it scales down to like 70-ish for ur uai contribution?
someone explain please.
That sounds a bit too slack but the general idea makes sense. Here is the way in which the two scaling systems work, which should explain why stuff appears screwed.
A: The Board of Studies HSC marks are scaled by actual people - supposed 'experts' take a look at a certain percentage of the papers which represent a rough cross-section of the marks, and determine what kind of mark meets the vague specifications of a band 6, band 5, band 4 etc. This form of scaling has no impact at all on the UAI so it's not really worth examining in depth
B: The UAC scales the mark purely according to candidature. The UAI computer will look at the Latin candidature, and look at their results across the board, and hence it will formulate a mean and standard deviation to which all Latin marks have to be scaled. These are very very wild guesses, but the mean raw mark for latin continuers would be very close to 90 I imagine (I know the median (not the mean) mark at our school was about 93); and the UAI-computer determined mean might be around 81 (again a wild guess) - significantly lower but still not bad considering that General Maths is about 36.
Hence the down-scalage. But not quite as dramatic as 90 to 70 i wouldn't think...