Can teachers give easy sac marks for a high study score?

[X-NEER]

What if your teachers give you 100% on every sac? Can you get a good study score?

[Joseph41]

What if your teachers give you 100% on every sac? Can you get a good study score?

I wondered about this when I was going into VCE, too! I think it's a fair question - fundamentally, there are some things that threaten a fair VCE system:

→ Students sitting different SACs for the same subject
→ Those SACs being marked differently

Even assuming everybody studying Methods (for example) sat the exact same SACs across the year (which definitely won't be the case), they could still be marked quite differently. For example, School A might have very lenient markers, whilst School B might have very harsh markers.

The system accounts for this.

I'm going to directly quote my own post from this thread to explain my understanding of it in more detail:

Spoiler

VCAA wants a fair system. The current system reflects that; it has been devised in a way that aims to eliminate all unfair advantage or disadvantage given to any particular student. As you can no doubt imagine, there are a couple of things that threaten the fair system that VCAA is hoping for.

One of these is the fact that different schools have different SACs and could, therefore, give out extremely easy or extremely difficult tests compared with the VCAA standard. For example, my school might give really easy SACs, and the school in the next suburb might give very difficult SACs. This would obviously be to my advantage – it would be easier for me to get a good mark than those students at the other school.

Another potential flaw in the system is the idea that teachers mark differently. So even if, hypothetically, every school in the state administered the same SACs, we’d still face the issue that some teachers mark stringently, whilst others are more lenient. It would genuinely suck to lose points from your results just because of the way your teacher marked, and VCAA knows this very well.

So, what VCAA does is aligns (or moderates) each school’s SAC results to be more in line with VCAA’s own standards. Let’s consider a few different examples.



We have three different schools here: School A, School B and School C.

Throughout the year, students from School A received a median mark of 50% on their SACs. But in the end-of-year exam, the median mark for that cohort was much higher: 75%. What this suggests is either that School A’s SACs were more difficult than VCAA’s standard, or that they were marked too harshly. This wouldn’t be fair on the students from School A, so VCAA boosts their collective SAC marks accordingly.

Throughout the year, students from School B received a median mark of 80% on their SACs. But in the end-of-year exam, the median mark for that cohort was much lower: 50%. What this suggests is either that School B’s SACs were easier than VCAA’s standard, or that they were marked too leniently. This wouldn’t be fair on other students who sat more difficult SACs, so VCAA lowers School B’s collective SAC marks accordingly.

School C’s median SAC mark and exam mark is about the same, so VCAA makes no change; those SACs already seem to be reflective of VCAA’s standard. This directly from VCAA: [12]

Students now have moderated School-based Assessments, which are comparable across the entire VCE system. For example, if we compare moderated School-based Assessments in Geography, we can be sure that a student in Horsham with a mark of 75 has a higher achievement than a student in Richmond with a mark of 60. Before moderation we would not have been able to tell which student had the higher achievement because they are on different scales…

Comparing SAC marks before moderation just isn’t logical. In the same way, consider two tubs of bricks: one weighs 50 kilograms, and the other weighs 100 pounds. It’s illogical to say that the second tub of bricks is heavier just because 100 is greater than 50; we can’t really compare them, because they’re set on different scales (kilograms and pounds). When we convert them both to the same measurement scale, we can actually see that 50kg is heavier than 100lbs, but we couldn’t tell that until we’d moderated the scale.

That’s exactly what VCAA is doing with SAC moderation. As such, comparing your raw SAC marks with those of people you know from other schools is a pretty fruitless exercise. It’s a little more complicated than that, as indicated by the quote below, but that’s the basic premise.

[T]he following marks are determined for both the School-based Assessment scale and the external score scale: the highest achievement, the upper quartile, the median and the lower quartile.³ These scores are used as fixed points for aligning the two scales…

[13]

The other take-home point here is that, really, it’s in your interest for your cohort to perform well on the exam(s), and trying to sabotage your cohort’s exam marks is really just sabotaging yourself.

Where it gets really interesting, though, is that this sort of thing also happens on an individual level, and that’s what we’ll look at now in the form of rankings. Also note that these raw study scores don’t consider the competitiveness of that subject in that given year, and we’ll consider this in the “Subject scaling” section later on.

So to answer your initial question with a few thoughts/comments:

→ I guess teachers could give inflated marks to students if they really wanted to
→ But in the end, this would probably be adjusted for due to exam performance of the cohort
→ It would presumably also lead to issues in the cohort, as students need to be ranked in terms of SAC performance (so not everybody can get 100% on every SAC)
→ I've personally never come across a teacher who would jeopardise students' actual learning in this way, and I'd hope it wouldn't happen at all