• Congratulations to the Class of 2024 on your results!
    Let us know how you went here
    Got a question about your uni preferences? Ask us here

Subjects? Scaling? Effort? (1 Viewer)

Coookies

Member
Joined
Sep 27, 2011
Messages
472
Gender
Female
HSC
2012
Just a random question, but what scales better, chemistry or physics?
 

RivalryofTroll

Sleep Deprived Entity
Joined
Feb 10, 2011
Messages
3,805
Gender
Male
HSC
2013
Uni Grad
2019
Just a random question, but what scales better, chemistry or physics?
Chemistry often scales better than Physics.
It's a close rivalry for scaling between Chemistry and Economics (with Physics being just behind).
 

Coookies

Member
Joined
Sep 27, 2011
Messages
472
Gender
Female
HSC
2012
Chemistry often scales better than Physics.
It's a close rivalry for scaling between Chemistry and Economics (with Physics being just behind).
Then whats this rumour Im always hearing that Physics is the "hardest science"?
 

D94

New Member
Joined
Oct 5, 2011
Messages
4,423
Gender
Male
HSC
N/A
Jesus...
Standard can ruin your other marks.
That's ridiculous, why not just have it like most other subjects where 5% to 10%, or whatever, get the band 6's.
Under 100 people in the state each year getting a band 6 in standard. Stupid.
It's not done by a bell curve. Theoretically, if every student performed to a Band 6 level, then every student would get a Band 6. There isn't some x amount which gets a Band 6. Don't see how it's stupid.
 

RivalryofTroll

Sleep Deprived Entity
Joined
Feb 10, 2011
Messages
3,805
Gender
Male
HSC
2013
Uni Grad
2019
Then whats this rumour Im always hearing that Physics is the "hardest science"?
Physics is rather the 'most technical' science. Many students tend to associate technical things to being hard.
In general, I'd think Chemistry is the hardest science.
Economics could be considered as the 'Physics' of Social Science due to it's hard nature combined with technical concepts.
Most HSCers/Past Students tend to tell me that Chemistry HSC exams are really hard compared to Physics...
 

theind1996

Active Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2011
Messages
1,256
Location
Menai
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
N/A
Then whats this rumour Im always hearing that Physics is the "hardest science"?
difficulty is a relative concept so what's difficult for one is not always difficult for another person. but from general consensus:

- BIOLOGY IS MOSTLY MEMORISING, LESS APPLICATION
- CHEMISTRY IS MEMORISING, BUT SLIGHTLY MORE APPLICATION THAN MEMORISING
- PHYSICS IS IS MEMORISING TO A SIMILAR EXTENT (SLIGHTLY LESS) THAN CHEMISTRY, BUT A LOT MORE APPLICATION
 

theycallmebob

Member
Joined
Aug 28, 2011
Messages
348
Gender
Male
HSC
2012
Aligning refers to the 'altering' of marks so that so many people achieve a certain mark.

For example (exaggerated), 99% of biology students in the HSC get under 40%. Aligning is where they take this 40% and stretch it so that it becomes to top mark of 100, thus not everyone fails and so many people achieve a band 6,5,4 etc. It was clearly a ridciously hard exam.

Scaling, however, is done by UAC after all your marks and aligning have been done.

For example, the marks of two subjects are sent to them. They see one student got 80% in Extn Maths and another got 95% in Industrial Technology. They realise that it is a lot harder to get that 80% in maths then industry. Consequently, when they convert these marks into your ATAR equivalents, the marks change to reflect this difficultly. Therefore, 80% in maths is 'scaled' up to an ATAR mark of 95(ish) and a 95% is 'scaled' down to 90(ish).

This is as simple as i can put the difference between aligning and scaling :)

Please let me know if I have made any mistakes.
But isn't that moderating??

Fuck this is confusing
 

Autonomatic

Member
Joined
Dec 8, 2011
Messages
66
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
N/A
Oh great... I'm doing English Standard and I'm planning on doing Senior Science TT.TT
 

Cl324

Member
Joined
Oct 28, 2011
Messages
264
Gender
Male
HSC
N/A
No they're not the same thing. Im just gonna quote cem on this one
Three things happen to your marks:

1. Moderation - this is the process of adjusting your school sent in marks to the range, mean, median etc of the exam marks.

2. Aligning - this is the process of adjusting the raw exam marks to the Bands - this is done by a team of markers determining what mark for a question would be the mark achieved by a student at the cut-off of each band - it has nothing to do with the quality of the cohort although it does bring in the difficulty of the paper. I have been on the aligning panel a couple of times and know a number of other people who have done this as well. Now I don't know about all subjects but I know of none that align down rather than up - that doesn't mean that there aren't subjects that do that just that I have never heard on one.

3. Scaling - this is the process of adjusting the marks to compare the performance of the cohorts in the different subjects and is done by UAC to determine the ATARs.
 

SunnyScience

Member
Joined
Oct 10, 2011
Messages
706
Gender
Male
HSC
2012
No they're not the same thing. Im just gonna quote cem on this one
Sorry, that is correct.
I created some kind of paradox in my answer and confused myself in the process!
Thanks for the correction.
 

Magical Kebab

Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2011
Messages
708
Gender
Male
HSC
2013
Just do advanced English, seriously. It will help your essay writing for other humanity subjects and standard will literally destroy your ATAR, hypothetically speaking.
Do advanced.
 

Aceitachi

Member
Joined
Feb 12, 2012
Messages
47
Location
Heaven
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
2013
just get 85+ in standard and you will be fine, if u get lower the 85ish just :rage:
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 0, Guests: 1)

Top