How much will an entirely missed page bring down my student's overall score?

[diamondjimbo]

Hi all, First time for our family to undertake the ATAR journey. My child finished her exam, and is a very good student, but realised later that she had missed an entire page in the Psych exam. Is there any way to even roughly estimate the impact that missing a whole page will do to her Psych, and overall ATAR, score? It's unfortunate of course but trying to get a handle on the real impact of the oversight... thanks for any help you can provide. / DJ

[Sine]

Hi DJ, sorry to hear about what happened. I can see how it would be extremely frustrating for something like this to happen.

Ultimately if a student misses a page they will recieve 0 marks for all the questions on that page so this could be only a few marks or a bunch depending on what was missed. It will obviously impact the students study score bringing it down but they should still be able to score relatively well if they did really well on the sacs and all the other questions. A positive would be that in psychology everyone loses marks so you would be impacted less in this subject than something like further maths where a lot less marks are dropped. There is not much that can be done right now though but to learn from the experience and make sure it does not happen again.

The impact on the ATAR score will be whatever study score impact this has on psychology

Hope this helps 

[Bri MT]

Obviously this is not an ideal situation to be in, however,  I would expect the psychology exam to have about 120 marks total and assuming the page missed was in short answer maybe 8-16 marks on a double page. I can't guarantee this but this is based on my memory of past exams.

Last year students could score in the 90s out of 120 and still get an A grade for the exam. I can't guarantee that that will be the case this year but I would urge you and your daughter not to panic.

If, in the end,  she outperforms on 4 other subjects then psych will only contribute 10% to her ATAR.

It's very common for students to make mistakes in the pressure of an exam room that they would not usually make.  If your daughter does not already have a timing strategy including reviewing her answers at the end it might be useful for her to adopt one for future exams to reduce the chance of mistakes like this occurring in the future.

Best of luck to your family for what remains of her ATAR journey