[Year 12 SofDev] Scaling - renamed

[Timmer-Arends]

Andrew has covered most of the ground re scaling - it is not the subject, 
but the students who choose it - however, I have a problem with the whole 
notion.

>When you equate this to students who do Specialist and Latin who also get a 
>mean of 30 you can probably see that there is >perhaps not an equivalence 
>of result. VTAC attempts to address this inequity by scaling. If you look 
>at last year's scaling >report then you will see that some subjects were 
>scaled down by over 10 points (wow you might say - but look at the 
> >subjects. Would a student who could do Latin and Specialist do those 
>subjects? Seriously,  ?)
>
>Now think about the students who take SD (and ITA )  . Are they really as 
>good as the students doing Specialist and >Latin ????? So they need to have 
>their results processed or manipulated so that it can be seen to have some 
>equivalence of >outcome with those who do the harder subjects.

Scaling assumes that students who can take on Specialist and do well in it 
will do equally well in IT or History, or Dance - is that a fiar assumption, 
especially when the whole purpose of the exercise is to generate a number 
which saves the tertiary institutions from having to think seriously about 
prerequiste subjects to their courses.

regards
Robert T-A
Brighton SC