Explained: NSW HSC Alignment, Moderation and Scaling
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HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE YURUI FROM THE FUTURE HERE:
Please don’t read this article unless you have to. This was surprisingly a pretty popular article of mine - probably owing to the fact that when I had started out, I targeted high school students + this was my first ever article published (apart from my philosophy, which probably needs a renovation at some point, owing to how much humans can change in such short periods of time - I am still Yurui, just having learnt and experienced quite a ton more. enough rambling now lol).
The best thing you can do is to not waste your time thinking about these silly high school exams. I was pretty deep into it and in retrospect, wasted hundreds of hours checking out UAC scaling reports, trying to wrap my mind around alignment, moderation, and scaling.
Just do your best, and let the scaling work itself out. You can't control it anyways... so why don't you just do your best?
Don't worry about your marks lol. They REALLY don't matter in the long run. I got my HSC results/ATAR a week ago and I’ve forgotten about them already - there’s so much more to life than high school.
You’ll find success either way - even finding this page means you’re curious enough to dive deep into the tiny corner of the cosmic universe that is the internet. Keep following obsession, and let your heart and intuition guide you. For it always seems to know what to do :)
Yurui
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The New South Wales Higher School Certificate (HSC) has quite a few complicated processes that most high school students don’t take the time to explore. The New South Wales Education Standards Authority (NESA) has the pretty insane task of finding a standardised measure of academic success for tens of thousands of students across the state. It’s pretty easy to just disregard these processes; who cares about how marks get calculated anyways? This article attempts to break down how the HSC works in terms of alignment, moderation and scaling.
So, you just got your HSC results back, and you’re wondering what the numbers in each column means. I’ll be referring to the Examination Mark, Assessment Mark and HSC Mark in this article - your Performance Band is just the range that your HSC Mark lies in, with a mark from 90 to 100 resulting in a Band 6, 80 to 89 resulting in a Band 5 and so on.
A sample HSC Results table - this person did pretty well in their Software Design and Development course!
So how does my examination mark differ from the mark I got in my exam?
You might have been expecting an 80/100 in your HSC exam – however, your examination mark comes out to be 93/100! How did this happen? Well, NESA aligns your mark to a representation of how well you achieved the descriptors for each band in the syllabus, otherwise known as “performance standards”. This is the process known as ALIGNMENT. You have no control over your examination mark and alignment, but know that usually, the closer you are to 100/100, the less alignment boost you receive (ie. 93 aligns to 96 whereas 70 aligns to 85). Check out the HSC Raw Mark Database for more information; if you would like to see your actual raw mark in your HSC exam, you can pay a small fee to NESA after your receive your results.
How does my school mark differ from the assessment mark?
Your school mark is the mark you actually get in school from your three or four HSC assessment tasks – you might get 95/100 and be Rank 2 in your class. Now, your 95/100 is actually useless – what NESA actually cares about is your rank. Basically, NESA matches your marks in the HSC exam with your rank in your class to calculate your assessment mark. If you got 10th in your class on the day and you were Rank 1 internally, you would keep your own mark as your Examination Mark (the 10th in your class mark) and then you would receive the highest exam mark in your class as your Assessment Mark (because you were Rank 1). These are then averaged to find your HSC Mark as part of the process called moderation. Just to reiterate, if you are ranked N in your class, your HSC Mark is your Examination Mark (what you get on the HSC exam), averaged with the N-th highest mark of everyone in your class. This is the process known as MODERATION.
I’ve heard so many people talk about it, but what actually is scaling?
The previous two processes, alignment and moderation are performed by NESA. This final process is performed by UAC. Basically, every HSC subject is standardised to an aggregate mark of your best 10 units, which is then ranked to find your ATAR. Subjects are scaled to estimate what an individual’s marks would have been if all courses had been studied by all students – this is done by comparing the marks of the cohort in English Paper 1 (Common Module) to the marks of the actual subject. Hence, the more difficult subjects (such as Maths Extension 2) have generally better scaling, as these students generally do better in English Advanced.
What does this all mean for me and what should I take away from this?
I have to stress that this process is completely out of your control; however, I wrote this article to try and clarify as much as possible in your leadup to the HSC. You don’t want to be a few days days out from doing any HSC exams, worrying about how well you need to do to hit your goals or what a bad mark might mean for you (I had to learn this the hard way in 2021 when I was doing my first HSC exam). Honestly, this whole process is super convoluted and it’s really not super important to understand everything I’ve written about above. At the end of the day, you should choose subjects you enjoy, try your best in everything that you attempt, and set realistic goals according to the university course you want to study.
Yurui
DISCLAIMER: I have, to the best of my ability, tried to ensure this information is as accurate as possible. I take no responsibility for any information which turns out to be misleading or incorrect and I cannot guarantee that this information is always up to date. All information displayed are for general informational purposes only.
