Students in years 11 and 12 in Victoria, Australia, will be aware of the Victorian Certificate of Education, but for those that don't know, it's a qualification administered by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA).
Generally, the VCE is studied across years 11 and 12 and students typically take between 4 and 6 subjects from a selection of over 90. The only obligatory subject choices are for a subject within the “English group” of subjects.
This means that students in Victoria have a huge choice of subjects and a lot of things to think about. One thing that affects this choice for a lot of students is how a subject scales. Before we explain subject scaling, though, we'll need to look at how VCE subjects are assessed.
VCE Exams and Assessments
Every VCE subject is slightly different in terms of assessments and exams, but in general, students are either assessed by their school or externally by the VCAA.
For school-based assessments, there are school-assessed coursework (SAC) and school-assessed tasks (SAT). External assessments are the exams that students take and these usually hold the most weighting towards their final results.
With school-based assessments, sometimes students are given an "S" (Satisfactory) or "N" (Not-satisfactory) grade, though the schools are allowed to give students a numbered grade to indicate their performance if they wish (though this won't affect their VCE grade).
VCE Study Scores
Once students have completed a VCE subject (all assessments for all units), they will be given a “study score” from VCAA that indicates their performance relative to their peers across the state. What this means is that the students aren't given an absolute number based on how many marks they got in an exam but rather they're provided a number based on their rank in comparison to the other students taking the same assessments.
For VCE study scores, this is a number between 0 and 50 and 30 being the score of the average student. Study scores are allocated according to a distribution curve so the “30” study score is the most common.
More than half of all students will be given a study score of 30 or above. However, only slightly over a quarter of students are awarded a study score higher than 35. The top 9% of students get above 40 and the top 2% are given 45 or more.
How VCE Scaling Works
In the VCE, subjects such as maths and science typically scale up, while arts subjects tend to scale down. English and business subjects usually maintain their original scaling.
If the way study scores worked gave you an idea to pick either easy subjects or avoid subjects that high-achieving students usually pick to boost your results, the VCAA is way ahead of you.
If this was the only thing that affected study scores, you'd find students choosing subjects in an attempt to game the system either by choosing VCE subjects perceived as easy, subjects they believe the lowest-performing students will pick, or picking popular VCE choices.
After all, if you give yourself very little competition, you could end up with the highest study scores. This is where scaling makes VCE subject study scores fairer, more comparable, and harder to exploit.
In addition to giving students a "raw study score", students' study scores are also scaled according to several factors.
Through statistical analysis, the VCAA takes into account how different students perform across different VCE subjects and the correlation between results across different subjects.
This means that if one particular subject attracts high-performing students, they won't be punished for the fierce competition they had to face. Conversely, students can't boost their scores by taking subjects they suspect to be easy.
Ultimately, scaling removes the risk when choosing subjects by allowing students to choose whatever subjects they want because they won't be disadvantaged by choosing more difficult VCE subjects or able to exploit the system by choosing easier subjects.
Scaling is just there so that study scores across all subjects are comparable.
Will Scaling Harm My Results?
Knowing that your study score could ultimately be brought down by scaling is a concern for students, but just remember that if your score is scaled down, it's only to make the score comparable to other subjects and more reflective of your performance.
Generally, the better you do in a subject, the less it scales. If you get a raw 50 in a subject, your study score will never be scaled. Similarly, it's very rare for 45 to be scaled down a lot.
Don't worry about messing around with scaling as the study score you have after scaling is the fair one so you're neither being punished nor rewarded for your subject choices.
How Different Subjects Scale
While the results will always be fair because of scaling, it can still be interesting to know how subjects scale just to give you some idea of the challenge you'll face.
Subjects that scale up are generally thought of as difficult and those that scale down are thought of as easier. While this isn't necessarily true as every student is different and what you find difficult isn't the same as everybody else, it can shed some light on the complexity of certain subjects and the difficulty of their assessments in comparison to others.
After all, scaling shows you how much each subject's study scores need to be adapted to be comparable to the other subjects and shouldn't be a major factor in choosing your VCE subjects.
The Best Scaling Subjects
These are the subjects that often see their study scores scaled up. You might be surprised at how much certain study scores have to be increased to be comparable.
Chemistry typically scales higher than other science subjects due to its competitive cohort.
In 2022, a median score of 30 in chemistry generally scaled up to 34, reflecting an average increase of 4 points.
For example, the hard sciences like biology, physics, and chemistry all scale up. Biology almost doesn't scale, but there may be 1 extra point because of scaling for certain students. Physics can scale up by 2 points, but the real winner in terms of scaling is chemistry which saw up to 4 extra points last year.
However, it's maths where scaling was quite severe. Maths Methods scaled up by up to 5 points last year, but Specialist Maths (which requires Maths Methods to study), could scale up by up to 12 points!
You might be thinking that you see the pattern here; maths and science are hard so these subjects are the ones where students' study scores are pushed up by scaling, but you'd be wrong because some of the most extreme scaling goes to foreign languages or the Languages Other Than English (LOTE) subjects. Latin saw some study scores increase by 16 points!
The Worst Scaling Subjects
When it comes to scaling down, the numbers are quite as extreme as scaling up, perhaps because even though it's mathematically fair, seeing huge numbers of points wiped from your study score could be really demoralising for students. In any case, these are the subjects whose scores are most negatively affected by scaling.
Though biology, chemistry, and physics all saw scores scaled up, VCE Psychology saw some scores drop down by a point or two, though the very best study scores remained unaltered.
Psychology is the only science subject in the VCE to experience a scaling down of scores, whereas biology, chemistry, and physics all saw their scores scaled up.
Further Maths is the exception to the rule when it comes to the VCE Maths subjects. It didn't get scaled down by much last year, but some students could lose up to 3 points from their raw study score.
While Languages Other Than English subjects were scaled up, VCE English and VCE Literature were both English subjects that took a point or two from the most common study scores. VCE English Language, on the other hand, scaled up by a similar amount.
Physical Education could see some study scores dropped by 3 points with the higher scores unaffected.
The real losers in terms of scaling are Business Management and Health and Human Development, two VCE subjects that could see students lose up to 4 points off their study scores!
Should I Use Scaling to Choose My VCE Subjects?
The short answer is absolutely not, at least not if you're trying to game the system. You can use scaling as an indicator of difficulty to some extent, though.
While you might want to pick a bunch of subjects that scale up a lot, a bad result in any of these subjects won't miraculously scale up to a good study score. If anything, picking only the traditionally difficult subjects could land you with an insurmountable workload and make your VCE study wholly unmanageable.
Really, what you want to do is pick the subjects that you like or will need to study for your future. Look at what the requirements are for the universities you want to attend, the courses you'd like to do, or the jobs you want to get. These will give you a much clearer idea of which subjects you'll need to study.
Scaling won't decide whether or not your study scores are good, you will!
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