After sitting an exam, the next time you will feel that nervous is when you are eagerly awaiting the results. It can be a time filled with questions… did I do well enough? What if I don’t pass? Or what if all my study was for nothing!
And then the moment comes – the results are handed back. There is the big number you were so keenly waiting for staring you in the face. But then you realise – it’s just a number. What on earth does this mean?
Many of our students often come to us with this question and luckily enough we have been around the block a few times to understand the best way to interpret marks. Here are a few pointers we share with our clients:
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Your mark is dependent on how everyone else in your class performed. Teachers will often pilot mark a few papers to see which are the strongest and then mark according to that standard. In turn, this produces two results:
o The first – a year group as a whole performs very well. Rather than award top marks to everyone, the competition bar is set higher meaning that marks may be distributed more evenly across the cohort.
o The second – there are some students that are outliers while others contribute to the average cluster. This means groups of marks sit together at the average and then individual marks higher and lower.
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In light of the above, the best way to understand your mark is to appreciate where you sit in relation to your fellow students.
o Take for example a situation where the average mark was 14/20 on a hard Maths assessment.
o As a raw number, this seems poor that the average is just over a pass – however this is both a reflection of the difficulty of the paper and collectively the cohort finding it challenging.
o Therefore, if you received a mark of 13-15 you would be happy that you fall into the average even though the number itself does not seem strong.
o Then we have another student who scored 17. In this case it would be evident that you performed really well as it is well above average, even though it may not be the highest mark achievable.
o How about if the top mark was only 19 – then a score of 17 or 18 is an even better result as you are only 1-2 marks away from the highest mark.
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Another important factor is to remember how much each task weighs. At the top of the notification, it will indicate how much weighting a particular task has.
o Sometimes for example it will be an in class test and only have a weighting of 5-10%. This means how much the mark from that assessment will contribute to your end of semester mark.
o Other assessments, such as half yearly exams will attract a heavier weighting of 50%.
o This means that if you perform really well on the 5% assessment but then not as well on the 50% task, your final mark will not be as strong as the mark achieved on the 5% as the majority of the mark is determined by the result on the exam worth 50%.
There is a lot to take in and every circumstance and situation often have different facts which need to be considered when understanding marks.
Chat to us today to see how we can help you navigate through these tricky times!