Does Standard english affect ATAR results? (1 Viewer)

makin156

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I have been told by many past students that doing standard english will lower your ATAR results...i'm just wondering if this is always going to be the case. Is it necessary to get a band 6? I am pretty confident with my other subjects such as 4U mathematics, physics, chemistry and economics. Does standard english really affect your mark?
 

Aidybear

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wow. im in the same boat. Except i do french not economics. 4Unit maths is dead easy compared to english. i wanna drop to standard so bad.
 

Ragib

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It's quite misleading to just say "Not Necessarily". The truth is that you have to perform at a much higher percentile in Standard English than Advanced to achieve the same scaled mark. The scaled marks of each subject is added together to form an aggregate out of 500, which determines your ATAR.

For example, in 2008, to have achieved a Band 6 in Standard English you would have had to be in the 99.3th percentile, ie the top 0.7% of the state. Even then, your scaled mark would have been 84.6/100.

Comparatively, in 2008 to have achieved a Band 6 in Advanced English you would have had to be in the 89th percentile, ie top 11%, and that scales to 84.2/100 aggregate.

In other words, it is quite a lot easier to achieve a higher scaled mark from Advanced than Standard in the sense that you don't have to be ranked so highly within the state for it. Whilst one can reason that the cohort for Standard may not be as good at English as the Advanced crew, that reasoning doesn't account for this wide margin. It is definitely much easier to be in the top 11% for Advanced than to be in the top 0.7% for Standard. In fact there are many reports of even worse odds, many threads here talk about how there's only a handful of band 6's in Standard every year.

My advice would be to do Advanced if you are able to do it, not being allowed to enroll but if you think you have the capability and motivation to do some work, but if you are really really bad at English, you may have to stick to Standard. But if you can cope with the work, Advanced English will end up giving the better ATAR, most likely.
 

annabackwards

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It's quite misleading to just say "Not Necessarily". The truth is that you have to perform at a much higher percentile in Standard English than Advanced to achieve the same scaled mark. The scaled marks of each subject is added together to form an aggregate out of 500, which determines your ATAR.

For example, in 2008, to have achieved a Band 6 in Standard English you would have had to be in the 99.3th percentile, ie the top 0.7% of the state. Even then, your scaled mark would have been 84.6/100.

Comparatively, in 2008 to have achieved a Band 6 in Advanced English you would have had to be in the 89th percentile, ie top 11%, and that scales to 84.2/100 aggregate.

In other words, it is quite a lot easier to achieve a higher scaled mark from Advanced than Standard in the sense that you don't have to be ranked so highly within the state for it. Whilst one can reason that the cohort for Standard may not be as good at English as the Advanced crew, that reasoning doesn't account for this wide margin. It is definitely much easier to be in the top 11% for Advanced than to be in the top 0.7% for Standard. In fact there are many reports of even worse odds, many threads here talk about how there's only a handful of band 6's in Standard every year.

My advice would be to do Advanced if you are able to do it, not being allowed to enroll but if you think you have the capability and motivation to do some work, but if you are really really bad at English, you may have to stick to Standard. But if you can cope with the work, Advanced English will end up giving the better ATAR, most likely.
Hence him saying not necessarily - it may be harder to get a good aligned in advanced than standard, but the doesn't mean you won't end up with a good ATAR.

One would presume that if you get say into the 60th percentile for advanced english, you'd get into a higher percentile in standard english that is roughly equal to the same scaled mark. But as Ragib said, that is not entirely true. Just aim for as high as you can and whatever happens will happen ^^

Do keep in mind that although there are few band 6s in standard english, a high band 5 is usually enough to get an ATAR >97 depending on your other marks of course :p
 
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hence him saying not necessarily - it may be harder to get a good aligned in advanced than standard, but the doesn't mean you won't end up with a good atar.

One would presume that if you get say into the 60th percentile for advanced english, you'd get into a higher percentile in standard english that is roughly equal to the same scaled mark. But as ragib said, that is not entirely true. Just aim for as high as you can and whatever happens will happen ^^

do keep in mind that although there are few band 6s in standard english, a high band 5 is usually enough to get an atar >97 depending on your other marks of course :p
+1
 

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