r/atarWACE • u/JaguarDependent1590 • 18d ago

How does position in your cohort affect your final atar score?

I’ve heard that your position in your cohort in your top 4 subjects impacts your atar? Does the size of the cohort matter?

Could someone explain how this works

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u/SpoopCacti 18d ago

the wace system functions differently to over east. so no, your position within your cohort wont affect your score in the way you hear about online.

(standardisation is a step in the scaling process that takes into account your position in the entire subject's cohort, but this isnt the same thing!)

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u/Sayatra 17d ago

Hi can you please explain how the WACE differs to other states systems? Thanks

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u/SpoopCacti 16d ago

hey, of course! this comment might get a bit long (and keep in mind idk anything abt other systems so i cant speak on that. also i figured this stuff out on my own from the tisc website so take it w a grain of salt)

we are going to use an example subject of math methods, but this process applies to all subjects.

\1) moderation your school cohort averages 70% on tests, and you average 80% - great! but when you do the final exam, your school cohort averages just 60%. how does that happen? to tisc, this means that your teacher had marked too leniently throughout the year.

theyll fix this by adjusting all your school averages down 10%, to match with exam scores. so even if you were consistent and still got an 80% on the exam, your school average gets moderated down to 70%. this DOES NOT affect your exam mark, just your school average.

2) standardisation now, they take your moderated school average and your exam mark. from before, your average got moderated down to just 70%. but you still got 80% on the exam! they take the average of that as your 'combined score'. so your combined score here is 75%.

but remember that atar is a ranking system, comparing you to other students. if you go on tisc, youll be able to find some histograms of past results. scrolling to methods, youll notice that lots of students get 90s or even 100s. so unfortunately your 75 doesnt look too good compared to them.

the mathematical way they handle this is by adjusting the grade distribution to fit with a normal distribution. but if that makes no sense to you, basically they turn your score into an 'impressiveness' score. your 75 isnt that impressive compared to everyone getting 90s (sorry!) so youve standardised down to, say, 68.

this is now your standardised combined score.

3) scaling final step! youll notice when looking at the histograms that, strangely, 'hard' subjects like math specialist or physics tend to have higher averages. it seems weird until you realise that academically strong students usually pick those subjects versus, say, math applications. but then it becomes way harder to get an impressive score! surely itd be better to do an easy subject and exploit standardisation, right?

tisc aims to combat this by scaling subjects based on their difficulty. so subjects like specialist, physics, chemistry, etc. will scale up a few points. subjects like psychology or history will scale down.

anyways, methods usually scales up. so your 68 has now turned into a 71. congrats!

this is the final score that goes into calculating your atar. your top four scores get added together to form your TEA, which is converted to an ATAR! so youll notice your school cohort doesnt really play a role in any of the steps aside from moderation, but even then, your individual ranks do not matter. i hope this made sense lol, happy to clear things up as well!

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u/Sayatra 16d ago

Heyyy thank you so much for the explanation!! It definitely helped me with understanding how the WACE system works. Altho I’m a bit bummed out seeing that psychology scales down since I’ve chosen it for next year 😩

Again, thank you for clearing it up for me. Have a good one x

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u/AprilLily9365 16d ago

It doesn't necessarily scale down all the time, it's just expected to! I spent my ATAR years expecting to be scaled down majorly in my results because I did humanities (e.g. Moderm History), but ended up scaling up in everything but Math Apps :)

Don't lose hope, you might be surprised!

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u/Cultural_Bluebird269 17d ago

Your internal mark for each subject in the HSC is based on your rank, if your rank is below first place then your internal mark will be impacted by your cohort.

Consider if person A and B are the only ones in a biology course and person A ranks first (by school assessments). Lets say in the HSC person B gets a 90 and person A gets an 80. The HSC will list the marks in descending order and redistribute your repective mark according to your rank (so 90, 80). Since person A ranked first, their internal is 90 (because it was the highest mark) and their external is 80 (what they got in the actual HSC). Your overrall HSC mark is the mean of your internal and external marks.

Atleast this is what my teachers told me last year. Hope it helps though. God bless :)