How does HSC alignment actually work?🤔 (1 Viewer)

[eduiwqh23]

Hey guys, i've seen ppl estimating what raw marks align to what mark, and i'm not sure how that works (like how do you now how many points you can go up by).

I feel like this is a stupid question to ask, but since I've finished HSC, was just curious cause there's nothing I can do now except wait for band 6s or if my cohort will pull me down or smth

 

[carrotsss]

alignment is the process of converting your raw marks in the exam to your “exam mark” which you receive from NESA. it’s calculated based on interpolation between band cutoffs which are determined by a board of people at NESA, who look at the paper and then find what mark they think corresponds to each of the band descriptors - so for example, if a paper is easy then they might say that 85 corresponds to the band 6 criteria, whereas if it’s hard then it might be something like 80. the idea behind alignment is to make marks more or less comparable between years, so your band 6 in English indicates the same level of performance as someone who got a band 6 two years ago. if you want to see past alignment data, check out https://rawmarks.info

 

[scaryshark09]

NESA:
alignment: raw exam marks --> exam mark
moderation: ranks and gaps --> assessment mark (based on cohort exam performance and ranks)
HSC mark = average of these two marks

UAC:
scaling: hsc marks --> scaled mark --> aggregate (total of scaled marks) --> atar

(note: only bold marks are ones you actually find out)

So essentially, you will get a raw mark once your paper is marked, but you dont find out this raw mark unless you pay for it. Instead, you will recieve an aligned mark which is usually higher than your raw mark. Alignment is where the markers at NESA use band descriptions to work out the raw mark a student should achieve to meet each band. In the case of English Adv lets say, if you got a raw mark of 84, this was usually be an aligned mark of around 90, and would be displayed as 90 on your HSC results
edit: alignment essentially takes into account how difficult the HSC exam was

 

[carrotsss]

NESA:
alignment: raw exam marks --> exam mark
moderation: ranks and gaps --> assessment mark (based on cohort exam performance and ranks)
HSC mark = average of these two marks

UAC:
scaling: hsc marks --> scaled mark --> aggregate (total of scaled marks) --> atar

(note: only bold marks are ones you actually find out)

So essentially, you will get a raw mark once your paper is marked, but you dont find out this raw mark unless you pay for it. Instead, you will recieve an aligned mark which is usually higher than your raw mark. Alignment is where the markers at NESA use band descriptions to work out the raw mark a student should achieve to meet each band. In the case of English Adv lets say, if you got a raw mark of 84, this was usually be an aligned mark of around 90, and would be displayed as 90 on your HSC results
edit: alignment essentially takes into account how difficult the HSC exam was

I’ll add that technically scaling is based on raw marks, but all the publicly available data we get on scaling is from aligned marks and so are ATAR calculators, so for most purposes it can be simplified that way

 

[mmmmmmmmaaaaaaa]

tbh you have no need to worry about how it works - just chilax