schoolstudent115

  • Joined Jul 25, 2022
  • In VCE Behind the Scenes: Moderation, Rankings, Scaling, Aggregates

    chemistry1111 Your SAC rankings are preserved, but then to get your final Unit 3 and Unit 4 scores, they allegedly (this is the 'consensus') use your cohort's exam scores and then use your ranking to find the corresponding exam score. E.g. If you are rank 2 in Unit 3 sacs, then your Unit 3 final score will be equal to the 2nd highest exam score in your cohort. Now there seems to be other significant adjustment made after that, as I ordered a statement of marks and the result was nonsensical under this interpretation.

    There are sometimes (small) statistical moderations after that if you happen to be on the border of a quartile in your class, but this is not really important.

    • In Questions about Spesh

      justaperson_

      Hardest topic in my opinion is Vector proofs, mostly because here you actually do proof rather than raw computation; therefore at least initially it may seem a bit harder. Although, this tends to either not show up on the exam, or only has a few marks allocated to it.

      Grade distribution is just the distribution of marks on the final exam. Last year the average mark was lower than usual due to the difficulty, but because people tended to find it harder on average (i.e. got a lower mark), and since study score is essentially a comparison to the cohort, this didn't really matter.

      • In Questions about Spesh
        1. Highly dependent on the individual. Personally, I found the content harder than Methods, but still overall very doable. That's about as much as I can say.
        2. You need at least one of those, I'd say. Either will probably do.
        3. Yeah, in comparison to methods at least. You go deeper into the topics at hand, in comparison to methods which tends to just scratch the surface of the topics then move on.
        4. Yes, however I believe this will be reduced (or removed? cant remember) post-butchering of the study design. It's a shame as I think this was the most enjoyable part of the subject. It seems they're adding proof though which is quite nice.
        5. Some of the calculus (the basics) are covered in both subjects, also a bit of the statistics (except, Spec talks about sample means whereas methods focuses on sample proportions).
        6. I found the content interesting, but not particularly hard. The exam was disproportionately hard though in my opinion. However it didn't really matter in the end since the grade distribution accounted for this.