How your HSC works
- Image: Miriam Fluit, Hunter Christian School, (detail) ARTEXPRESS, HSC 2006
Step 7 – Moderating assessment marks
As every student in the state studying a course sits for the same examination your exam marks have a state wide ‘currency’. However, your school assessment marks only have a school-wide currency. In other words, we need a way to take account of how your assessment marks compare with marks given to students doing the same courses in a different school.
Different schools and different teachers have different approaches so this step – moderating your assessment marks – is very important. Put simply, we use the statewide external exam marks as a way of adjusting for any differences in the way your teachers mark compared to other schools.
Read the full description of moderation.
In short, the moderation of assessments is a statistical procedure that uses the external exam marks for the whole school group in that course to adjust the school’s assessment marks for those students. For each course the procedure adjusts the average of the school assessments to be equal to the average of the examination marks obtained by the group. It also sets the top school assessment to be equal to the top examination mark, and sets the bottom assessment mark to be equal to (or close to) the bottom examination mark.
Once this is done all the assessment marks awarded by a school for a course will have been adjusted (moderated). These marks are not released, as they still need to be put through a further adjustment – this is called ‘alignment’.
Alignment means that exactly the same adjustments are made to the moderated school-based assessment marks as are made to the raw examination marks. That is, the borderlines between the bands determined through the standards-setting procedure become the borderlines for the moderated raw assessment marks. It is appropriate to apply the borderlines from the examination to the moderated school assessment marks because both sets of marks are in the same currency.
In this way the assessment marks reported to students for each course are related to the same set of standards established for the examination marks in that course.
Useful links
- HSC Assessment in a Standards-Referenced Framework – A Guide to Best Practice. A booklet that will assist schools and teachers in designing and implementing good policies and procedures for the Higher School Certificate Assessment Program.
- Determining a Student’s Achievement in the HSC