hey everyone my name's Jamin I'm a hey chess a physics lecturer here at a time outs and in this video series I'm pretty much going to be talking about HSC scaling and alignment which is something that I think very few people understand properly and I think it causes a lot of people a lot of anxiety and grief so I'm going to try and go through the key aspects of the process that you should understand there's sort of three elements to it and the first one I'm going to focus on this video is alignment which is where we take a raw exam score and do some magic with it to make it a bit more reflective of the difficulty of the exam and also a little bit of the strength of the cohort as well so the way alignment works is we take a raw exam score and the first thing we do is we convert it to a mark out of a hundred now this affects subjects where the mark isn't out of a hundred for a two-unit subject so English is one of them music is one of them all those sort of subjects where you don't quite have a mark out of a hundred they scale it or moderate it to be out of a hundred then what they do is they apply something called band cut-offs now what these are is they're numbers that come out of a detailed review of how the exam went for all the students in the state and what chief examiners come up with is basically a cut-off that a certain band student should have been able to achieve in that exam so they might say that a band six student should have been able to achieve an 88 in this exam and what that means is that anybody who got an 88 or higher in the exam their exam mark will actually be pushed up to be in the band six range or at so in 90 or above and this happens for all the bands so there's a band five cutoff a band 4 cutoff and so on and it's basically a mapping to account for the fact that exams can be more difficult or less difficult year to year so they have to adjust for that as they go there's some other magic as well so there's optional question scaling so for example if the cohort studying a particular text in English does a little bit worse than the rest of the cohort they'll push that elective or that text up so any subjects with electives they'll be doing that as well but I guess the key takeaways are essentially that the raw exam score isn't necessarily what you'll see as your exam mark on your HSC results report so when you get your raw results from exams like trials then it might not be exactly what you get at the end there's this magic that happens in between so you have to be aware that that takes place and treat your raw exam scores from stuff before the HSC with a little bit of a grain of salt in the next two videos will be covering moderation and how you're eight times produced so make sure to check those out as well [Music] you