Not being told our numerical sac marks

[Chazef]

yo yo yo, I was wondering if my school is the odd one out here when it comes to disclosing students' sac marks. My school has a policy where you can't be told your numerical mark for a sac e.g. 29/35  and instead we are given grades (Very High, High, Medium, Low). We do get to know the percentage range of those grades but ultimately I think it's ridiculous not to tell students what marks they get for a sac. It makes it considerably more difficult for teachers to explain where students need improvement and it reduces the level of competition (which is horrible in my case as competition with peers is the only thing that really motivates me so knowing I got 1 or 2 marks above my friend is a great motivation booster).

In an assembly today I asked a teacher why this was, and he said it was due to the statistical moderation that our sac marks are subject to, however I believe that there's no harm in disclosing sac marks and trusting students to understand that their marks may not be reflective of their actual proficiency in a subject. It just seems like a way of saying 'we know our school performs badly in exams so to prevent a bunch of angry phone calls from distressed parents, we'll just obscure the system so it's not a huge surprise when you get a lower study score than you expected'. Apparently the VCAA strongly advise for the VH/H/M/L policy to be used, and I just can't get my head around why anybody would support such a thing.

[Shenz0r]

I wasn't given my marks for English, Chinese, and for some of my French SACs. We were given our SACs back, but only with our grades. So in a sense we still could get feedback and we still know where we got things wrong.

I would've liked to know what my actual marks were, but in the end you end up not caring anyway...

[availn]

Some subject I was given the SAC back with marks and answers. In one of my subjects, I didn't get anything back. It just changes here and there.

[michak]

Yeah we werent told as well, we were just given either a very high, high, medium, low or veru low but we did know what the ranges were.
Most of the time though we could all roughly work out how many marks - if any - we had lost.

[pi]

Yeah I didn't know any of my numerical marks.

Honestly doesn't matter, as I've said heaps of times: "Don't play a numbers game, play a 'do the best you can game'".

[alondouek]

My school has the same policy - no numerical sac grades, only a ranking (VL to VH, though some subject only range from L to H). In French, my teacher opted not to give us even those, but instead went over the SACs (if they were essay/oral-based) with us.

To be honest, I really liked the way my school did it; if I'd had the actual numerical grades during VCE, I would have spent a lot more time calculating how well I think I would do, instead of actually working.

[thushan]

Hmm. My school was extremely open; we got our marks back (no grades) for each subject, and for some subjects we were even given our exact rank. For some of our subjects (bio, methods, spesh, chem) we were allowed to actually keep our SACs.