VCE psych score

[Jigyasa]

for the past few years psych has been a subject that students have done generally well in, while the standard average study score is 30, psych’s average has been around 40 -43, hence why vcaa changed the design to make it harder, but does that mean psych may go up this year because people didnt do so well, or will people who got say B+ for their mid year touch the 40 study score at the end??, because state avg was only C+

[Slumdawg]

for the past few years psych has been a subject that students have done generally well in, while the standard average study score is 30, psych’s average has been around 40 -43, hence why vcaa changed the design to make it harder, but does that mean psych may go up this year because people didnt do so well, or will people who got say B+ for their mid year touch the 40 study score at the end??, because state avg was only C+

I'm about 110% sure that psychs average has always been 30. And it always will be. The state avg for the exam for psych is always C+, check out any other year. And no psych will not go up this year unless randomly a huge bunch of people doing well in all there other subjects decided to take it up which is not very likely.. Psych will most likely go down 1-2 points for those in the 30s range and down even less to nothing at all for those in the 40s and above.. The difficulty of the subject doesn't determine scaling, it's how the students doing the subject go in their other subjects..

[andy456]

Do you have a source that says that psych's average is around 40-43 because I don't think it is. If it was wouldn't every single student in VCE take psych to get easy marks then?? AFAIK psych's average SS is 30, just like the majority of VCE subjects.
The scaling of a subject is not determined by the complexity or ease of the exam/s of the subject. It is determined by the scores of the other subjects that psych students take. So, heres my take on it. VTAC looks at all the psych students scores for every subject. If for example everyone in psych got an average of 35 in all there other subjects then from the average score, lets assume 30, in psych it would scale up by ~5 to align with the other scores. So in a way it is kind of like saying getting a 30 in psych is the same as getting a 35 in subject X so thats why it scales. A process of standardizing results. Its obviously more complex than this but as you can see exams do not play a part in scaling.
Unless someone will get an extremely high A+ on the end of year psych exam and high SAC marks then you won't be able to get a 40 with a B+. Unless of course you are right in saying that the average score in psych is in fact a 40-43

[Jigyasa]

I went to a psych mid year revision lecture and the lecturer who also is vce assessor said that majority get a 40-43, not too sure what that means now.

[Tashi]

Dude, study scores are determined over a bell curve. Meaning the majority get a study score of 30. It's like that for every subject. Only 8% of people get above 40. "majority get a 40-43" is absolutely wrong.

[Slumdawg]

Maybe they meant the majority of their students get 40-43 or the majority of the people who go to their lecture get 40-43? What company was this with? The majority are at 30 and that will always stay that way no matter how competitive or hard the subject gets.

[WhoTookMyUsername]

for the past few years psych has been a subject that students have done generally well in, while the standard average study score is 30, psych’s average has been around 40 -43, hence why vcaa changed the design to make it harder, but does that mean psych may go up this year because people didnt do so well, or will people who got say B+ for their mid year touch the 40 study score at the end??, because state avg was only C+

that is not why VCAA changed the course.

[REBORN]

The reason why VCAA changed the course is to stop the influx of comments liken to "Psych is not a subject."

Ehem...it's now the hardest mid-year exam. Seems as though they succeeded.

[playsimme]

^ not to mention marked like a bitch x10392 which definitely doesn't help

[pi]

The reason why VCAA changed the course is to stop the influx of comments liken to "Psych is not a subject."

No offence, but I doubt those comments will ever stop. They change the study design because it is compulsory to review every study design, every few years (4, I think).

[REBORN]

You're probably right...the comments won't stop.

Still at least now VCAA has the stats to back Psych as a subject - the hardest mid year.

and FYI your wrong. It's changed because of what I said.

Eg - Biology is accredited from 2006-2014. I don't see any 4year review there...

[pi]

+1 Bazza


I did say I wasn't sure on the exact figure... It might be 6 yrs, or it might vary per subject. I know that each subject DOES have an accreditation period, after which they review it. Subjects can get extensions to their accreditation (usually 2-4 years) during these reviews, hence screwing with the average that I assumed was 4 years (it may not be exactly 4 years, but that is close enough).

They DON'T change a study design because most people don't think the subject is worthy of being a 'science'.


(lol, are you iNerd/ATAR? The similarities are enormous...)

[Tashi]

The reason why VCAA changed the course is to stop the influx of comments liken to "Psych is not a subject."

Ehem...it's now the hardest mid-year exam. Seems as though they succeeded.

A+ cutoff isn't a measure of how hard it is. I'd still say chemistry is the hardest, particularly because of the high A+ cutoff. This is because competition is really strong in chem and a lot of smart people do it. It's way harder to get in the top 9% of chem than the top 9% of psych.

[playsimme]

^ i kinda agree.. the exam wasn't actually conventionally 'hard', it just caught people off guard; 15 marks is alot to bullshit if you didn't study for it enough meaning more people got owned due to lack of prep for that random question... I think the easy short answers were marked way too harshly and on top of that people like myself got caught off guard for the alzheimers q. Like who would think of studying alzheimers in depth? nobody, hence the low cuttoff

[Russ]

Still at least now VCAA has the stats to back Psych as a subject - the hardest mid year.

Because it had the lowest A+ cutoff? Sorry, but that doesn't prove it's harder than another subject, it just means the exam was harder than previous years. Technically you could also stipulate for the same cohort, but the sample size is large enough that it doesn't matter.