psych or spec

[TerryJ]

Which is harder to achieve a 50 is psychology or a 50 in specialist mathematics? How is it harder?

[EvangelionZeta]

If you mean raw scores, easily Spesh.  The cut-offs are insane and you have to be a freak to get everything right in the first place.

If you mean scaled, I don't know.  Probably Psych, since getting a 50 in any subject is probably harder than getting the 41 raw Spesh requires to get 50 scaled.

[Ilovemathsmeth]

Hmm well I don't do Spesh.

But, I got 49 in Methods. I'd say, for Methods, being less difficult than Spesh (again have no personal experience), it was more of an effort to get a raw score of 49 than to get 50 in Psych. This is purely because Maths subjects involve a lot more work. There are more questions to do, get exposed to etc. And practice - plus logic. To get A+ on Exam 1 Methods, you needed 37.5+. For Psych, you needed more like 81 out of 90. There's more leeway to make mistakes in theory subjects to still get 50, whilst to get 50 in a Maths/numerical subject, you have to be pretty much perfect (alas that sad sad mistake of mine where I forgot to extend my graph to the full length of its domain )

I'd assume in any case that a 43 (or whatever raw score scales to 50 in Spesh) is equivalent to a stable 50 in any subject, e.g. Methods, Psych, Acc, Chem, Physics etc. This is due to the moderation that takes place, standardising performance across all subjects to make sure people aren't disadvantaged.

[Ilovemathsmeth]

Haha yes in reply to your PM, I did work a fair bit. I did lots of trial exams and did extra questions to help consolidate the material. Like Checkpoints, A+ exams, A+ notes etc. In addition I had rank 1 on SACs in a strong cohort. For Psych, although the concepts are easy to understand, you do need to practice in order to perfect your short answer responses