Sunday, December 14, 2003

The longest 7 hours of my life 

At 7am tomorrow morning, our ENTER scores are coming out. Four digits that will determine what uni I go to, which state I will live in, what course I will do, and what career I will embark upon. Guess who's not sleeping tonight? I'm both looking forwards to the results and dreading them. The former because this suspense is killing me. The latter because, well, there might be a nasty surprise.

Four digits. A hundreth either way might mean that I have to live another month in limbo until the offers come out on Jan 19th. A hundreth that I may have lost for writing ten words over the limit in French, or ten words too few in English, or for forgetting a state in Chem, or dropping a decimal place in Maths. Bloody hell, this is agony. AGONY.

A quick explanation of the VCE scoring system (as I understand it). Each student has to do a minimum of 4 subjects, with one being English. The norm at my school is 6 subjects. The study score in each subject is out of 50, and it indicates your rank in relation to other people studying the subject.

This is complicated by a marvelous thing called scaling. Scaled scores take into account the fact that the competition in different subjects varies. So if you're doing a subject where lots of people get a high mark, eg. accounting, your scaled score will be below your study score. Two special cases are maths and languages. There are a few levels of maths; at our school there's Further, Methods and Specialist (in ascending order of difficulty). The harder ones get scaled up. LOTEs are adjusted so that the scaled mean goes up by 5. Scaling also means that a weird thing happens where you can get a scaled score of above 50. I don't know why, but I'm sure not complaining.

To get your ENTER, or tertiary entrance rank, your top three scaled scores plus your score for English are added together, plus 10% of your other scores to form your aggregate, which is then ranked (again, normal distribution), so you get an ENTER out of 100 (the highest possible rank is 99.95 however).

For example, my subjects are English, Maths Methods, Chem, French, Latin & Legal Studies. My Legal score from last year is 45, with no scaling. Suppose that I get 45 "raw" in all my subjects. The scaled scores & aggregate->ENTER are according to last year's table.

Subject: raw study score / scaled score / contribution to aggregate
Eng: 45 / 45 / 45
Latin: 45/ 54 / 54
French: 45 / 53 / 53
Maths: 45 / 49 / 49
Chem: 45 / 48 / 4.8
Legal: 45 / 45 / 4.5
Aggregate = 210.3
ENTER > 99.8

But of course I'm not going to get 45 in everything. My low estimate, 35 raw for everything except Legal (45) and Latin (30) gets to an ENTER of around 96. Which is enough to get me into law, but come on, I want some prestige! UMelb= 99.4, Monash= 99.0, USyd= 99.6, UNSW= 99.4...and that's from last year, this year they'll probably be higher because of less funding. ANU should be around 95 , but I don't know if I could deal with moving out yet.

Cross your fingers, toes, eyes, arms, legs, and other available body parts for me.

# posted at 11:55 pm

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