Less than 13 days!

[Fantasia94]

I don't understand why subjects such as Latin/French etc scale up by so much whereas Arabic,bosnian etc don't .

[Azerel]

I don't understand why languages are so crazy!

[brenden]

Because scaling is based on the skill of the students enrolled in one subject in all of their OTHER subjects. So, someone enrolled in Bosnian is probably Bosnian, and may not be necessarily academic just because of that fact. They have the same chance of being academic as anyone else, whereas someone enrolled in Latin goes to a school that offers Latin which thus must be a very good school with a few exceptions. I'm talking private/select schools - because let's face it, not your average public school has a Latin teacher floating around. And I've got no evidence to back this up but I'd assume only the academic kids would even bother enrolling with Latin. Also, the students enrolled in Latin would probably have a higher English score on average.

[Planck's constant]

I really want a 40+ for Latin,
since if you get in the paper for Latin, let's be honest, you look like an absolute wizard

What do you have to do to get a 50 in Latin?
There has not been a 50 in the past 6 years.
But there was a 49 last year.

[watto_22]

I don't understand why subjects such as Latin/French etc scale up by so much whereas Arabic,bosnian etc don't .

My understanding is that Latin goes up so much because largely only really academically strong schools offer it.
The scaling is a reflection of the scores that the people in a subject (the cohort, to use a Latin word..) achieve for their other subjects.
Additionally, for languages, there is an automatic +4 scaling, because the government wants to increase communication/interaction with other countries. Such an explanation seems a bit weird given Latin's simply enormous prominence throughout the world. Nonetheless...

But so the difference between say Latin and Bosnian is that the schools that offer those two subjects, and hence the academic quality of those two cohorts is quite different. The variance in the scaling suggests that the Latin cohort of students generally outperform the Bosnian cohort in the other subjects undertaken by those students.

But why is it that more academically talented students take French or German and not Bosnian or Albanian? - that's a tough question to answer.
Perhaps because the most academically strong schools don't offer the latter two, and hence the best academic kids don't get a chance to study them? I'm really not sure.

[Planck's constant]

Apparently only 150-200 students do Latin, and I suppose most are of comparable ability.
Still, the top student each year should get 50.

[watto_22]

What do you have to do to get a 50 in Latin?
There has not been a 50 in the past 6 years.
But there was a 49 last year.

This is just heresay, can't guarantee accuracy.
But apparently, due to the bell curve and all that scaling-y sort of stuff, for someone to get a 50 there needs to be 200 students enrolled in the subject.
Without 200 people, you need to legitimately get 100% on every assessment throughout the year - every SAC and the exam.
Clearly, that hasn't happened. Last year two boys got incredibly close to doing so, and were rewarded with not only a 49 and a 48, but also Premier's Awards for Latin which were given out for the first time in recent history.

But that said, the difference between a 45 for Latin (scaled to 54) and a 50 (scaled to 55) is only one mark, so realistically there would be about 0.2 or fewer scaled marks difference between a 49 and 50.

I think it was last in the year 2000 that someone got a 50 for Latin. Wowee

[watto_22]

Still, the top student each year should get 50.

The top student for every subject should get a 50?
What about for say Swedish, where only 17 students took the subject in 2011.
Since a score of 40+ is the top 8% or so, only 1 of those students should get a score above 40. (fyi there was in fact only one published 40+ score last year, a 41)
Would you say that this student should automatically be given a 50 since after all they are the top student in the whole subject?
That seems unreasonable to me - just consider the gulf between a 40 and 50 for say English, and the marked difference this 10 mark discrepancy would make to an overall ATAR - but where would you draw the line?
Why make a distinction just for Latin (if that's what you meant by your post)?
I think the current system works fine, even if I have no idea how they determine study scores for such unpopulated subjects

[Planck's constant]

Yes, I was suggesting that there would be no harm done if the top student in each subject got a 50.
Raw subject scores are scaled afterwards to account for cohort strength, therefore the system would self correct for the purposes of calculating ATARs.

[brenden]

That doesn't make any sense. Like .15% of people should get a fifty every year in whatever subject. So in Swedish, if you round down, zero people should get a fifty. Scaling wouldn't correct the discrepancy in the slightest.

[FlorianK]

I don't understand why subjects such as Latin/French etc scale up by so much whereas Arabic,bosnian etc don't .

Because people doing Arabic/Bosnian/Turkish do pretty badly in their other subjects

[thushan]

That doesn't make any sense. Like .15% of people should get a fifty every year in whatever subject. So in Swedish, if you round down, zero people should get a fifty. Scaling wouldn't correct the discrepancy in the slightest.

I think something weird happens in this case. When there are twoo few students, I SUSPECT that the actual exam score of the top student in the state determines that student's study score - so if the student gets 100% in the exam, that student is assigned a 50. Which explains why in Latin, when a similar number of students sit the exam every year, one year the highest score is 47, another its 44, another its 49, another its 50.

[brightsky]

Rumour has it that Mr. Mountford only hands out 50s to students who score full marks on the end-of-year exam. :S The MGS student who got a 49 must have come really close to 100%.

[thushan]

Rumour has it that Mr. Mountford only hands out 50s to students who score full marks on the end-of-year exam. :S The MGS student who got a 49 must have come really close to 100%.

Who's Mr Mountford?

[nisha]

I don't understand why we can't just email the government or something to get them to keep our results so that we never have to see it. THAT would be so much better.