Help, please? (1 Viewer)

[LoveHopeFaith]

Hi.

Well I have been homechooled for most of my life and next year I am going to high school (selective) for the first time. You could say that I am somewhat 'ignorant' of the UAI scaling and that is the reason for my posting.

I understand that the UAI is a ranking system. What I do not understand is the 'bands'. What is meant by band 2, 3, 4, 5, 6?


I am very confident I will do well in high school. However, I MUST get a UAI of 90+ as I would like to do medicine in university.

The subjects I have chosen, are:
- Advanced English
- Modern History
- French (Beginners)
- Chemistry
- Biology
- IPT (although I am considering doing Extension English or Ancient History instead)
- General Mathematics

If I do very well in these subjects, will I possibly get a UAI of 90+?
Also, which subjects may scale down my UAI (I am aware that general mathematics will) and in order to get a better UAI would anyone suggest that I do either extension english or ancient history instead of IPT?

 

[dp624]

Hi.

Well I have been homechooled for most of my life and next year I am going to high school (selective) for the first time. You could say that I am somewhat 'ignorant' of the UAI scaling and that is the reason for my posting.

I understand that the UAI is a ranking system. What I do not understand is the 'bands'. What is meant by band 2, 3, 4, 5, 6?


I am very confident I will do well in high school. However, I MUST get a UAI of 90+ as I would like to do medicine in university.

The subjects I have chosen, are:
- Advanced English
- Modern History
- French (Beginners)
- Chemistry
- Biology
- IPT (although I am considering doing Extension English or Ancient History instead)
- General Mathematics

If I do very well in these subjects, will I possibly get a UAI of 90+?
Also, which subjects may scale down my UAI (I am aware that general mathematics will) and in order to get a better UAI would anyone suggest that I do either extension english or ancient history instead of IPT?

a) for medicine you'll need a lot more than 90. You need good interview and also a good umat. What i think - you'll need about 95 percentile umat, 99 UAI and good interview just to be sure.
b) with those subjects, if you do well, you can easily get in the 99s and if you do well enough you can get 100.
c) only the best ten units will count. anything that doesnt count doesnt affect ur uai in any way. however it would be prudent to do some more units of maths, it will help your UAI heaps. try at least 3 unit.
d) extension eng or history will be better for your uai than IPT.
e) subjects don't scale down your uai, they just don't scale up. there is a point where for every mark you lose, the more you get scaled down. for the sciences this is about 95.
f) bands are performance marks sort of.
1 - less than 50%
2 - 50 to 60%
...
to 6: 90 to 100%
it's not actually % but that's an analogy

my 2c

 

[anon09]

In terms of your subjects, IPT doesn't usually scale that well whereas extension english and ancient history do carry better weightings.

If you pick ancient history instead of IPT, you will be doing 14 units and you only need 12 so you may be creating an unecessary workload for yourself. As you're going into year 11 (I'm assuming your in year 10 now), you don't want to "burn out" even before the HSC year starts so don't do too much if you think it'll cause problems later (but you can always drop a subject during the course of the year if you don't like it or it's causing you a lot of stress etc).

That being said, have you thought about scrapping IPT and doing, say, ancient history instead of general maths? Unless you want to do extension english, which means that you'd have to keep either maths or IPT.

It'd be good if you could talk to an experienced teacher and maybe they'll "mentor" you or something.

 

[lyounamu]

In terms of your subjects, IPT doesn't usually scale that well whereas extension english and ancient history do carry better weightings.

If you pick ancient history instead of IPT, you will be doing 14 units and you only need 12 so you may be creating an unecessary workload for yourself. As you're going into year 11 (I'm assuming your in year 10 now), you don't want to "burn out" even before the HSC year starts so don't do too much if you think it'll cause problems later (but you can always drop a subject during the course of the year if you don't like it or it's causing you a lot of stress etc).

That being said, have you thought about scrapping IPT and doing, say, ancient history instead of general maths? Unless you want to do extension english, which means that you'd have to keep either maths or IPT.

It'd be good if you could talk to an experienced teacher and maybe they'll "mentor" you or something.

Um..ancient history does have really low scaling. It isn't much diferent from IPT anyway.

 

[fallenstar]

Um..ancient history does have really low scaling. It isn't much diferent from IPT anyway.

Yeah, but it's not capped like IPT. The maximum IPT can contribute to your UAI is 93, even if you score 100 in the HSC. That means a score of 90 contributes about 82. pathetic scaling. I'd go for Ancient; it isn't capped at least.

 

[anon09]

Um..ancient history does have really low scaling. It isn't much diferent from IPT anyway.

I'm pretty sure it's still better than IPT and also general maths.

On "table A3", which shows the raw and scaled data for 2005, the highest mark in ancient was 50 (and it did not change with scaling) then the max in IPT was 49.5 and it dropped to 47.0 (these marks are per unit so double them for both IPT and ancient). I know that those comparisons aren't quite accurate because if you get 100% like that person in ancient, it's less likely to get scaled than a mark of 49.5 BUT the difference in mean between the scaled and HSC marks for IPT is 14 whereas in ancient, the loss was about 12 ... (for general maths it was almost 15).

Although, there was an odd result in History Extension (which I thought would scale well) as the max achieved in 2005 was 50 and it was scaled down to 49.3. Then the 25th percentile actually benefitted from scaling as their HSC mark was 30 and yet they went up to 30.5.

???