Class of 2011: ATAR and SS Discussion Thread

[WhoTookMyUsername]

. that's not what happens. it's +5 extra on all languages.

I think you've got your information slightly screwed up. Also, I was not complaining about spesh scaling, just about the fact that people were claiming that langauges were easier than spesh (which they aren't) and that they get scaled more (which they don't).

I don't think i do. It's not about the "toughness." If a subject is "tough" everyone finds it "tough" and it shouldn't affect raw scores. I'm talking about scaling. Latin -> 47 but the mean in other subjects is only 42 (from 30). It's +5.
I think you've got your information slightly screwed up.

[Russ]

If you can't play the system, then shut up and brute force it instead.

I take your point, but you shouldn't have to do either. The system is broken since it fucks over a large amount of humanities students and VCAA need to fix it (but never will because $$$)

[WhoTookMyUsername]

To be honest,

I can't believe you people give this much of a shit about VCE. It's over, quit whinging.

why are you on this forum then? if you've finished vce -> everyone has finished vce?

If you can't play the system, then shut up and brute force it instead.

I take your point, but you shouldn't have to do either. The system is broken since it fucks over a large amount of humanities students and VCAA need to fix it (but never will because $$$)

Really it's unfair to non - humanities (if humanities include languages) students. Languages students get this random massive +5 (espec for higher scaling subjects). Otherwise the system is logically fair and makes sense, it's "logical" to set the median study score for a subject equal to the students median study score in their other subjects.

[Menang]

I think I've said this before, but scaling does not reflect the difficulty of the content of the course. It only reflects the level of competition the state-wide cohort of a particular study presents.

What this means is that spesh doesn't get scaled up because the maths is hard. It gets scaled up because the people who do spesh excel at their other subjects as a whole, and thus the level of competition within the state-wide spesh cohort is much higher. If a whole bunch of "dumb" people did spesh, regardless of how difficult the content is, spesh would scale down.

So the system is fair in the sense that it reflects who you're competing against. But it is pretty unfair if you consider that a humanities student and a maths student probably works just as hard to master the content of the study and get a 45+ score in their respective subjects but only the spesh student gets a big scale-up.

Regarding languages, yes, the government offers a +5 at the mean both to encourage language studies and to reflect the difficulty of the content, but that's offered to all students. I agree that it's completely unfair that some native speakers get to do second language. VCAA try to address this with Chinese SL and Chinese SLA, as well as Indonesian SL, but it's still not quite a fair system. The fact remains that besides Latin, languages don't scale nearly as much as spesh, especially in the 40+ range.

[paulsterio]

If you can't play the system, then shut up and brute force it instead.

But you can't beat those who play the system and use brute force whilst doing so

Regarding languages, yes, the government offers a +5 at the mean both to encourage language studies and to reflect the difficulty of the content, but that's offered to all students. I agree that it's completely unfair that some native speakers get to do second language. VCAA try to address this with Chinese SL and Chinese SLA, as well as Indonesian SL, but it's still not quite a fair system. The fact remains that besides Latin, languages don't scale nearly as much as spesh, especially in the 40+ range.

Yes, that's right, the whole SL, SLA, FL divisions aren't fair, I know Chinese kids who have basically grown up in Australia speaking Chinese everyday, reading and writing well, technically they should be counted as SLA, based on ability, but since they were born here, they get SL and they end up getting like around 45 in Chinese SL, that really means that unless you're a native speaker, you won't get anywhere near 40, that's not exactly fair.

Secondly, true, most languages do not scale as much as spesh, but if you look at Chinese SL, Latin, Classical Greek, Hebrew, French, they all scale up massively. They are advantageous not because they scale up, but because they scale beyond 50. We all know that this year, it's impossible to get 99.95 unless you did a language and/or spesh (the aggregate required is greater than 210). Alright, so let's say there's a hypothetical scenario where I do two languages and spesh and get a score of 53 scaled in all of them (some go up to 55!) that's already 159, a decent score of 45 in English and that's 204, easily 99.95 with two 10% subjects.

See how you can get away with a 45 in English and still get 99.95, that's why languages are unfair, without them, you essentially have to get a 48+ in English to get 99.95, which is grossly unfair

[Russ]

Yes, it is indeed grossly unfair that you can "get away" with needing to be in the top 0.5% of students rather than the top 1.5% of students.

Really it's unfair to non - humanities (if humanities include languages) students. Languages students get this random massive +5 (espec for higher scaling subjects). Otherwise the system is logically fair and makes sense, it's "logical" to set the median study score for a subject equal to the students median study score in their other subjects.

The arbitrary +5 to languages is not desirable but it's the least broken part of the system right now. Marking to a bell curve and scaling is always going to discriminate against humanities subjects, because of the inherent differences (and class sizes for some subjects).

[paulsterio]

Marking to a bell curve and scaling is always going to discriminate against humanities subjects, because of the inherent differences (and class sizes for some subjects).

wouldn't you say that it is easier to score well in these subjects? i did software development last year and got a 48 (raw - scaled to 47.98) after dropping like 5 marks on the exam, I can assure you that dropping 5 will not land 48 in methods/spesh

[Menang]

Those languages probably scale up beyond 50 because they deserve to be scaled up, given the level of difficulty of the content and probably because of the level of competition as well. In the 45+ range of study scores, the default +5 at the mean weighs less than the actual difficulty of the subject, I think. Look at Indonesian, which, because it's relatively easy as a language, didn't scale beyond 50 at all. Those languages scale up because they are difficult, and that's fair enough.

[Menang]

Marking to a bell curve and scaling is always going to discriminate against humanities subjects, because of the inherent differences (and class sizes for some subjects).

wouldn't you say that it is easier to score well in these subjects? i did software development last year and got a 48 (raw - scaled to 47.98) after dropping like 5 marks on the exam, I can assure you that dropping 5 will not land 48 in methods/spesh

I don't know the statistics behind how many marks you get to lose in the exam. But I'd agree that the current system really doesn't help humanities students. I wouldn't say it's easier to score well in these subjects, I'd say it requires just as much or even more work to get the same study scores in both maths/science and humanities, but maths and science subjects would scale up more whereas humanities ones tend to scale down.

[paulsterio]

Those languages probably scale up beyond 50 because they deserve to be scaled up, given the level of difficulty of the content and probably because of the level of competition as well. In the 45+ range of study scores, the default +5 at the mean weighs less than the actual difficulty of the subject, I think. Look at Indonesian, which, because it's relatively easy as a language, didn't scale beyond 50 at all. Those languages scale up because they are difficult, and that's fair enough.

I think in a fair system, no subjects should scale beyond 50, because that disadvantages students who do subjects which stop at 50, it's like going into a F1 race and saying cars 1, 2 and 3 can go up to 120mph whilst others can only go to 100mph. No matter how hard I work, I cannot beat someone who gets a scaled score of 55 in say French

I don't know the statistics behind how many marks you get to lose in the exam. But I'd agree that the current system really doesn't help humanities students. I wouldn't say it's easier to score well in these subjects, I'd say it requires just as much or even more work to get the same study scores in both maths/science and humanities, but maths and science subjects would scale up more whereas humanities ones tend to scale down.

I won't argue, but the mean study score is usually less than 30 for humanities subjects, which means that there are a lot of "bad" people doing it and hence it is a little easier to score more highly in. For example if I'm good at Business Management, I might score say a 47, whereas someone of a similar calibre in Methods might only score a 43, so scaling sort of neutralises that effect by bringing methods up and BM down a little, don't you think?

[vea]

I might be a bit biased here but I don't think that language scaling is as unfair as most of you make it out to be. Just taking Chinese SL as an example, my class had some pretty strong Chinese students (some who were indeed strong background speakers and speak Mandarin at home) and we only had 3 people who scored 40+. Now out of these 3, two of them were actually non-Mandarin background speakers- they did not speak Mandarin at home but were still of Asian/Chinese decent. I think this just goes to show that the competition is Chinese SL is quite crazy and that you don't necessarily have to be a background speaker to do well in Chinese- just like most other subjects, hard work in Chinese pays off as well.

P.S: Just another thought, many VCE language learners have been learning their chosen language since year 7 or even earlier. The scaling could be thought of as a reward for their long-term commitment

[REBORN]

I don't care about +5 to languages - you'd be foolish to not acknowledge the difficulty of learning a language. It isn't a subject where it can be studied out of a book especially come oral exam; it requires a holistic understanding and continual, everlasting study. The only scaling that annoys me is Specialist Maths because as paulsterio has said, people with subjects that stop at 50 can never get a 99.95. Also hypocritical on VCAA's part IMO - always advocating for students to choose subjects they like rather than subjects that scale but for those very few who want 99.95 they must choose language/spesh.

Hopefully next year spesh lowers and the 99.95 aggregate lowers as uni (5.5) is taken out.

[harlequinphoenix]

 I got a dux medal yay ^_^ Sorry had to express my excitement somewhere.

[chocolatedaddy]

I don't care about +5 to languages - you'd be foolish to not acknowledge the difficulty of learning a language. It isn't a subject where it can be studied out of a book especially come oral exam; it requires a holistic understanding and continual, everlasting study. The only scaling that annoys me is Specialist Maths because as paulsterio has said, people with subjects that stop at 50 can never get a 99.95. Also hypocritical on VCAA's part IMO - always advocating for students to choose subjects they like rather than subjects that scale but for those very few who want 99.95 they must choose language/spesh.
Hopefully next year spesh lowers and the 99.95 aggregate lowers as uni (5.5) is taken out.

You'd be foolish not to acknowledge the difficulty of learning Spesh. I hope it still scales past 50 as it encourages Maths students who might be hesitant to take a challenging subject. If it didn't who would take a difficult subject like Spesh?

[thushan]

Another idea - how about cap the 99.95 cutoff to 209?