Login

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

March 29, 2024, 05:18:01 am

Author Topic: How do small classes affect rank (if at all)? Need help calculating some things.  (Read 4135 times)  Share 

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

flightlogs

  • Adventurer
  • *
  • Posts: 8
  • Respect: +1
Hi all,

Today I received ranks and marks back from my recent language exam and am not sure what it means. We have done two assessments already, with trials being the last internals - so far, my cumulative mark is 84% and I am ranked 5/9 (yep, only nine people in this class!). I know this isn't a bad mark but I ranked 2nd in the course last year so am pretty disappointed with how these exams have turned out. I'm also ranking first or second in my other subjects so I am worried that the gap between my other classes and this subject will pull me down (although I think languages tend to scale high? Not sure because I never paid attention to how subjects scale). I'd ideally like to get to top 3 internally after trials, but what kind of mark would I need to get to do that? I'm assuming at least 90%? Is it possible for me to pull up my mark that much in the trials? Total weighting of the trials exam is 45% - which is the highest weighting exam out of all the internals.

I definitely know I need to work harder in this subject, but I'm just wondering what ranks in small classes imply - is 5/9 good or am I severely pulling myself down? For context, I'm aiming for a 95 ATAR for the course I want to get into. With the way I'm talking about how much I care about ranks, it might come off as me trying for 99+ but I'm just paranoid that I'll somehow slip below 95 because a lot of my subjects (all humanities) do not have the greatest scaling so I really need to get high raw marks to guarantee that scaling doesn't bring anything down too much. I'd also really appreciate it if a maths person can help me calculate what percentage I'd need to get in my trials (which have a weighting of 45%) to bump up my current marks (84%) to a 90% - 95%. 4U kids do your thing, please ;)

If you've reached the end of this: Thanks for being patient with me and reading all of it, I feel like I'm all over the place trying to articulate the situation + how I feel because I've never worried much about scaling/ranks until these exams were given back.

All the best,

xx flightlogs.
humanities baby. (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:・゚✧

stella_atarnotes

  • Trailblazer
  • *
  • Posts: 37
  • Respect: +13
Hi all,

Today I received ranks and marks back from my recent language exam and am not sure what it means. We have done two assessments already, with trials being the last internals - so far, my cumulative mark is 84% and I am ranked 5/9 (yep, only nine people in this class!). I know this isn't a bad mark but I ranked 2nd in the course last year so am pretty disappointed with how these exams have turned out. I'm also ranking first or second in my other subjects so I am worried that the gap between my other classes and this subject will pull me down (although I think languages tend to scale high? Not sure because I never paid attention to how subjects scale). I'd ideally like to get to top 3 internally after trials, but what kind of mark would I need to get to do that? I'm assuming at least 90%? Is it possible for me to pull up my mark that much in the trials? Total weighting of the trials exam is 45% - which is the highest weighting exam out of all the internals.

I definitely know I need to work harder in this subject, but I'm just wondering what ranks in small classes imply - is 5/9 good or am I severely pulling myself down? For context, I'm aiming for a 95 ATAR for the course I want to get into. With the way I'm talking about how much I care about ranks, it might come off as me trying for 99+ but I'm just paranoid that I'll somehow slip below 95 because a lot of my subjects (all humanities) do not have the greatest scaling so I really need to get high raw marks to guarantee that scaling doesn't bring anything down too much. I'd also really appreciate it if a maths person can help me calculate what percentage I'd need to get in my trials (which have a weighting of 45%) to bump up my current marks (84%) to a 90% - 95%. 4U kids do your thing, please ;)

If you've reached the end of this: Thanks for being patient with me and reading all of it, I feel like I'm all over the place trying to articulate the situation + how I feel because I've never worried much about scaling/ranks until these exams were given back.

All the best,

xx flightlogs.

Hey! The main thing here is don't worry about your exam marks too much since there is nothing you can do about it. What you want to work on now is your future exams and the final exam in particular. I can help break down scaling and ranks a bit for you.

So in terms of cohort size, this doesn't really matter depending on how well your cohort performs. With your in school assessments and your trials, they are worth half of your final HSC mark, but they don't actually take into account the actual marks in your school. If you think about it, this would be very unfair if one school has very hard exams whilst others schools don't. These exams are just used to generate your rank in the cohort. What matters the most is your cohorts performance in the actual HSC because this can pull your mark up a little if you stuff up. So in your final exam you will get an actual mark out of 100. These marks are then ranked (e.g. a list of 9 marks from highest to lowest in your case). These marks are then assigned as your internal mark. So if you came 5th overall internally, your internal mark will be the mark of the person in your class who came 5th for the actual exam. This internal mark is then combined with you actual external mark. So in the case that you actually ranked 5th in the final exam, your internal and external mark might actually be the same!

If you look at the attached final HSC results, I can outline some of it's key features. So looking at English, this person came 14th internally for english and achieved an assessment (internal) mark of 94. This is the examination (external) mark of the person who came 14th in the cohort. This person's examination mark was 97 which shows that in the final English exam, this person was one of the top 14th people in their cohort since their examination mark was higher than their assessment mark. These two marks were then averaged to be 96 overall (HSC mark). This was rounded up from 95.5.

If you want to calculate your ATAR, I recommend HSC ninja as it takes into account the performance of your past school cohorts which should reflect the marks your current cohort achieves if your school is relatively consistent.

Hope this explanation helps!



flightlogs

  • Adventurer
  • *
  • Posts: 8
  • Respect: +1
Hey! The main thing here is don't worry about your exam marks too much since there is nothing you can do about it. What you want to work on now is your future exams and the final exam in particular. I can help break down scaling and ranks a bit for you.

So in terms of cohort size, this doesn't really matter depending on how well your cohort performs. With your in school assessments and your trials, they are worth half of your final HSC mark, but they don't actually take into account the actual marks in your school. If you think about it, this would be very unfair if one school has very hard exams whilst others schools don't. These exams are just used to generate your rank in the cohort. What matters the most is your cohorts performance in the actual HSC because this can pull your mark up a little if you stuff up. So in your final exam you will get an actual mark out of 100. These marks are then ranked (e.g. a list of 9 marks from highest to lowest in your case). These marks are then assigned as your internal mark. So if you came 5th overall internally, your internal mark will be the mark of the person in your class who came 5th for the actual exam. This internal mark is then combined with you actual external mark. So in the case that you actually ranked 5th in the final exam, your internal and external mark might actually be the same!

If you look at the attached final HSC results, I can outline some of it's key features. So looking at English, this person came 14th internally for english and achieved an assessment (internal) mark of 94. This is the examination (external) mark of the person who came 14th in the cohort. This person's examination mark was 97 which shows that in the final English exam, this person was one of the top 14th people in their cohort since their examination mark was higher than their assessment mark. These two marks were then averaged to be 96 overall (HSC mark). This was rounded up from 95.5.

If you want to calculate your ATAR, I recommend HSC ninja as it takes into account the performance of your past school cohorts which should reflect the marks your current cohort achieves if your school is relatively consistent.

Hope this explanation helps!

Hey!

Thank you so much for the response, I really appreciate it. Definitely agree with your advice; there's nothing I can change about past exams but with trials and actual HSC externals coming, I have to focus on doing better in these! I actually got all my ranks back recently and have put the marks through ATAR calculator but am not thinking too much of it because it's too early to be guessing when trials haven't even come around yet.

Thanks again for the help, cleared up a lot of the confusion about ranks, scaling, etc. for me.

Hope you have a good day!

xx - flightlogs
humanities baby. (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:・゚✧