HSC mark is the mark that a student is returned from NESA based on their performance in the HSC (including both internal and external examinations). There is a separate exam mark for each subject. The HSC mark is not necessarily the exact raw mark a student scored in the HSC but rather a mark that represents where a student sits with reference to the performance bands defined by NESA eg. a HSC mark of 90 would represent the expected performance of a Band 6 student. This means that HSC marks in the same subject in different years represent the same level of achievement.

The scaled mark is the mark that UAC uses when calculating a student’s ATAR. UAC will add the 10 best units of scaled marks for a student (for a total out of 500) then calculate what percentile they fall into, this is their ATAR. A scaled mark is worth the same across subjects ie. a scaled mark of 80 in Physics represents the same level of achievement as a scaled mark of 80 in drama which is in turn the same as a scaled mark of 80 in economics and so on.

Percentile measures where a student ranks as a percentage. For example: a percentile of 90 means that a student is better than 90% of total students and is in the top 10%. Similarly, a percentile of 40 means that a student is better than 40% of total students and hence is in the top 60%.

If you would like a quick overview of the important points, please skip to the end of this section

Does my school affect my scaling? Contrary to popular belief, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is no. The popular but incorrect opinion is generally due to people misunderstanding (or not knowing at all!) how NESA calculates internal marks.

All of the following information is from the guide (Moderation | NSW Education Standards) published by NESA on their website

To determine internal marks, NESA takes 3 main data points from how the school performed in each HSC subject’s external exam: the top mark, the mean (average mark) and the bottom mark (where applicable). The bottom mark may be adjusted if some students perform significantly worse than expected in the external exams to prevent the overall marks being “brought down” by students who performed exceptionally poorly in the HSC exam after performing well at school (this is often due to students being awarded “early offers” for university and then not putting in much effort to prepare for the actual HSC exam). They may also exclude students with upheld illness/misadventure claims and any other obvious outliers. 

Using the 3 main data points determined above, a quadratic function is generated (a curved line that passes through the 3 points). This function is used to put the internal performance of students on a common scale with the external HSC exams. When calculating students internal marks, there are a few things that NESA does that are significant

• The student who scored the highest in the school internal exams (ie. Ranked 1st internally) will get the highest external mark achieved by a student at their school as their internal mark. This means that if a student was first in both internal and external exams, they keep their mark and are not affected at all by the performance of their school. 
• The same applies for the student who scored the lowest in the school internal exams (ie. Ranked last internally)
• All ranks are maintained so that the student who ranked 1st internally will receive a higher INTERNAL mark than the student who ranked 2nd internally
• Relative gaps between ranks are maintained. This means that if there is a large gap between first and second place based on their performance in the school internal exams, there will also be a large gap in their calculated internal mark. Similarly, if first and second (or any other consecutive ranks) had a similar performance internally, their internal mark will also be similar. 

The benefit of this is that if a school has exams that are easier/harder than other schools exams, these differences are removed since all the internal marks are now compared against a common scale. To better illustrate this see the example below (from the NESA website).

 

In the example above, we see that student A performed significantly better than his peers in both the internal (school assessment mark) and external (examination mark) exams. Furthermore, we also see that most students have performed better in the external exams than they did in their school internal exams (this is backed up by the students having a higher average/mean mark in the external exam). 

From the external exams, 3 data points will be taken to help determine the internal marks that NESA awards, the top mark (92), the mean/average (68) and the bottom mark (50). Using this the following quadratic function and marks can be generated. 

 

Note that each student will keep their external examination mark without any further scaling, NESA only uses this process to calculate the internal marks. The final HSC mark is the average of the internal mark (moderated assessment mark) and external mark (examination mark).

• You can see that student A keeps their external examination mark of 92 and is not affected at all by the performance of the cohort. 
• Student F receives the lowest external examination mark of 50 as their internal mark
• You can also see generally the internal marks have gone up to account for the likely difficulty of the internal assessments at this hypothetical school and subject. 
  1. 4/6 students (ADEF) have a higher moderated internal mark than the one that their school awarded.
  2. students B and C were only moved down by 1 mark. 
• As shown in the graph with the quadratic function, the small relative gaps between students B/C and students D/E have been maintained. At the same time, the larger gaps between students A, B/C, D/E and F have also been maintained. 

What are the implications / takeaways from this?

• A high performing student will not be disadvantaged by a weak cohort at their school
• Being at a school that designs particularly easy or hard internal assessments does not put a student at any kind of advantage or disadvantage since they are all measured against a common scale through the processes outlined above
• The main focus for a student should be achieving a good internal rank and also ensuring their cohort performs well in the HSC
• While being at a certain school should not be a disadvantage, there may be other non-scaling factors such as the school environment, the quality of teaching and travel time that may affect a student’s performance. 

The UAC ATAR Compass tool is the only official tool for estimating your ATAR and provides the most accurate estimates. The tool will require you to enter your estimated HSC marks, if you are unsure about your expected HSC marks see the section below titled “How can I calculate my expected HSC mark?”. However, the UAC tool will not give you a breakdown of how your subjects scale or even which ones are counting towards the ATAR estimate that is generated. 

Alternatively, you can also use the graphs to help estimate an ATAR. This will provide you an indication of how each individual subject is scaling and also about which subjects are contributing the most towards your estimated ATAR. To use this method, choose a subject and open the “HSC mark to scaled mark” graph. 

You can use the graph to estimate your scaled mark for a subject as shown in the picture below, in the example the subject English Advanced has been used and the student is estimating they will score 88 in the HSC for English Advanced. 

 

We can see that the estimated scaled mark is around 80. To calculate a total score for all subjects, add together your 10 best units of scaled marks to get a total mark out of 500 (remember to half the marks for one unit courses and also that English must count regardless of whether it is in your top 10 units). This total mark is called the aggregate score. 

Once you have an aggregate score (out of 500), you can then simply load the “Aggregate Score to ATAR” graph and use the aggregate score to estimate an ATAR. In the example below, we can see that the estimated ATAR for a student in 2022 with an aggregate of 300 would be around 77-78. Generally, the relationship between aggregate and ATAR is almost the same every year. 

While there are also a number of third party sites that claim to estimate your ATAR, many are often using old data and have not been updated. Ever since the release of the UAC official ATAR estimation tool, these sites have mostly become obsolete and I would not recommend using them. 
 

There are a number of ways that you can estimate your expected HSC mark for a subject, it may often be useful to use multiple of the below methods together to produce the most accurate estimate.

• One of the easiest ways is to use the average scores and rankings published on the website. Search up your school and then find the average mark in your chosen subject. After this, look at your current marks and work out your rough position compared to your school average. Then you can use your schools average mark to give an indication of the mark you may achieve. 
• You can also simply ask your classroom teacher questions like “What mark at our school usually gets a Band 4?” or “How many people got a Band 5 & 6 last year?” to help gauge what mark or rank at your school would correspond to a certain Band in the HSC. Knowing what Band you are on track to achieve will give you a rough outline of the mark range you can expect to achieve in. 
• The website https://rawmarks.info/ provides a community compiled list of how some raw marks have been modified to HSC marks. To use this data you could attempt a past HSC paper or estimate how well you would do on a past HSC paper and then look at how that raw mark would moderate to a HSC mark. Note: due to the community-sourced nature of the data, there may be very little data for courses with less candidature. Furthermore, while the data is verified by the site moderators, it is not published publicly by NESA and hence cannot be independently verified.
• One last way to get a limited estimate of your expected HSC mark is to enter your school name and subjects into the HSC Ninja ATAR calculator (https://www.hscninja.com/atar-calculator). It will provide a small amount of info about how many students got a Band 6 at your selected school, this can advise you about what rank at your school would typically achieve a Band 6.

There are a variety of reasons that average school marks are very useful

• They can help in estimating your own mark, since you can see what the average student at your school would typically achieve, for most schools this mark does not fluctuate too much each year
• You can compare nearby schools and see which different subjects they perform well in and how well they are performing. This can help if a student is considering different schools and has a specific subject they are very interested in. 
• They can also be used to see how well a school is performing in individual subjects. At school, a student may find that the internal exams for Subject A are very hard while the exams for Subject B may be a bit easier. However, with the school average marks they can confirm how well the school performs in the external exams, it often is the case that schools with hard internal exams may have a very strong performance in the final external HSC exams. Therefore, a student may find that there is no need to be discouraged if their marks in Subject A are a bit lower than expected.  

Just half the mark values on the graph. Percentiles do not need to be adjusted.

If you are on a laptop or PC, you can click the dropdown and start typing the name of the subject you want and the selection should automatically jump to the subject you want.

There are a number of possible reasons that your school may not appear on the website or may not have any ranks displayed. The first is that we can only reliably find data for Public Government-run schools, private schools all provide data in different formats (if they provide data at all!) and it would be too hard to compile all of it. 

By government law we are also restricted to only publishing ranks for the top 10% of schools (see the next section for more info)

For privacy reasons we also do not publish average scores (and hence ranks) for schools with less than 10 students taking a subject.

NSW legal guidelines do not permit publication of school results that would rank a school as being in a percentile less than 90. Unfortunately this means that ranks can only be given for those schools within the top 10% for a subject. However, users are free to estimate a rank using the school average, state average and other rankings that have been provided.

Yes! Just right click (or tap and hold for mobile devices) on the graph and then press the “Save image” option or its equivalent.