I'm trying to get my head around text selection and how it impacts ATAR - are texts ranked according to difficulty? Or are the texts that are selected by high achieving students/schools presumed to be more difficult and so scores are scaled up?
I’d say it’s more subtle than subject selection, but certainly more well-to-do schools choose texts that are larger / longer, more complex, and therefore less chosen. This, in and of itself gives them a small bump as English exam markers see that text less often so are likely to be more excited by its appearance - giving it a small bump. But if they trust the kids can read the big texts there is by definition ‘more in there’ for them to analyse also. Does that make sense?
I'm trying to get my head around text selection and how it impacts ATAR - are texts ranked according to difficulty? Or are the texts that are selected by high achieving students/schools presumed to be more difficult and so scores are scaled up?
I’d say it’s more subtle than subject selection, but certainly more well-to-do schools choose texts that are larger / longer, more complex, and therefore less chosen. This, in and of itself gives them a small bump as English exam markers see that text less often so are likely to be more excited by its appearance - giving it a small bump. But if they trust the kids can read the big texts there is by definition ‘more in there’ for them to analyse also. Does that make sense?