Thats kind of dumb, what if people doing 4u maths are shit in other subjects? that means that 4u maths scales fuck all?
That's correct, and it's happened before - in 1989, 4u maths was actually scaled
down!
but why should a harder subject mean that it should get scaled more?
It's not how difficult a course is, it's how difficult it is to beat
other students doing that course.
I kno wat u mean...BOS should look at the actual difficulty of the course as well the canditure ability
This was how it used to be done (before 1985). Such measures of 'course difficulty' though are completely subjective and are not statistically valid. Who is to say whether biology is harder than business studies? Is an apple better than an orange? It doesn't take into account the ability of the course candidature, which is why the current system was implemented.
I think the scaling alogorithm takes into account that students are doing subjects they're either good at or enjoy, so they won't score as highly if they did another subject, y, they don't enjoy and a person doing subject y, won't do as well in subject x. That way, no one is disadvantaged for doing 'lesser' subjects.
Sort of. Students who do courses that they're either good at or enjoy will tend to go better than students who don't. However, it is obviously impossible to accurately and objectively measure how much a student 'enjoys' a course, etc. The scaling algorithms look at how students performed in all the courses they took and use statistical averages to determine whether a given candidature is 'more' or 'less' able.
u kno how they look at the candidature by looking at how well they did in their other subjects which affects the scaling, how would they do that for accelerated students?
As far as I know, accelerated students would still be included in this process. If they are only accelerating a single course, their course average will simply be the HSC mark they attained in that course. As Morgues said, because they form such a small minority of the candidature, any difference would be negligible.