Just wondering if I actually wasnt in the top 20 of my cohort and lets just say in the top 40%. Can I still get a 40 study score with a low A+ on the exams. I'm asking this cos our school doesnt give us our ranks, only scores so I just made a guess based on people I have asked and teachers comments after the sacs but because the cohort is pretty big, my guess could be way off and thats why im kinda worried I won't get that 40
Technically, yeah. If everyone from your school were to get 100% on the exam, your SAC marks would be adjusted to 100%. If everyone were to get 0%, your SAC marks would be adjusted to 0%.
Let's assume you're somewhere between 25th and 50th for SACs in a cohort of 100 people. Now, say the person who came 25th had an average of 70% on the SACs, and the person who came 50th had an average of 50%. Say you have an average of 55%. If you take your relative distance from 50th and 25th, you're one-quarter of the way between 50% and 70% (70-50 = 20, 55-50 = 5, 5/20 = 1/4). Now, the 25th rank on the exam (not necessarily the same as 25th on the SACs) gets a 90%, and the person ranked 50th on the exam gets a 60%. When your SAC marks are adjusted, you'll maintain this same relative distance from the 25th scorer on the SACs and 50th, while the 25th rank and 50th rank on the SACs will have their SAC scores adjusted to 60% and 90% respectively, so your SAC mark would be scaled to 67.5% (90-60 = 30, 30/4 = 7.5, 60+7.5 = 67.5).
You don't really need to understand the maths, just know that it's not at all locked in right now, and it's going to be down to how other people perform on the exam. If people perform super well, that's great. But to get an A+ on the SACs being ranked around 40th, you'd probably need 50th place to get around an A or even an A+ depending on your relative distance between 25th and 50th, which might be unlikely. Of course, if the top 25 students in your cohort perform amazingly, that'll drag up your score too. Point is, there's a whole bunch of factors involved that you have no control over, so just focus on doing what you can do. The exam makes up a big portion of your mark, so hey, if you do well enough, you won't even need others to do particularly well. Don't stress yourself over it, you'll bring down your own performance.