Dear Parents and Guardians,

The final four weeks of term is a very busy time for Year 11 assessment tasks with most subjects having a task due. This is an extremely important time as your son completes his first assessment task that will count towards his HSC. At our Division meeting this week I reminded the boys about time management (hopefully it is starting to sink in) and the support networks available at the College. These include; classroom teachers, school counsellor,  careers counsellor, boarding coordinator, academic coordinator, old boy tutoring, library staff and the list goes on. I discussed the importance of open communication with yourselves and staff in regards to any school issue but especially concerning assessment tasks. The boys’ HSC starts now and they need to ensure that they are achieving their potential. If students are concerned that they are not, for whatever reason, they need to communicate early to people that can help. I hope again that this message is starting to sink in.

Over the last month, many boys have been asking about ‘scaling’. There are many myths about scaling, the most common is, if you do a so called “hard” subject, you will be scaled up. This is not the case. Technically, how difficult a subject is has no effect on how well it scales. How well a subject is scaled depends on how well its candidature does relative to the whole cohort, if that whole cohort did that subject. This is one of the reasons why English is compulsory, because it is used as a cohort benchmark, from which all relative candidature performances are statistically compared. More specifically, the better the candidature for a particular subject does in their other subjects, the better that subject will be scaled.

The difficulty of the subject has no effect on how well it scales. While there tends to be a positive correlation between difficulty of subjects and their scaling, that is, people notice that harder subjects tend to scale better. The reason for this is that students who choose harder subjects tend to do better than their peers in their other subjects. Performance is always based on work ethic, when a particular subject is rewarded it is generally because the candidature achieved well and just so happened to do very well in their other subjects relative to their peers. A student or group of students who work well and achieve in a subject are most often working well and achieving across all their subjects.

You should always pick subjects you will be good at. There’s no point choosing Maths Extension if you have no talentin Maths. If you are passionate about Legal Studies and are able to score in the top 1%, that is so much better for your ATAR than doing something you’re not interested in or have difficulty doing and scoring in the bottom 10%.

Remember also that boys will always perform better in a subject they enjoy. If they are interested in the content they are more likely to be engaged in class, to put in extra work in study and retain information for their examination.

I hope this explanation of scaling helps. If you still have some concerns or questions about scaling, please do not hesitate in contacting me at the College. 

Regards

Darren Frost