What about Maths and General Maths?
Because I dropped down last year
Similar case.
However, I would say that General Maths is much much easier than 2-unit maths, whereas Advanced English and Standard English have similar difficulty. So sometimes (as the case of what happened in my 2-unit class in year 11), the difficulty change is justified with dropping down.
Though with Standard and Advanced, you still basically need to write the same essays. The texts are a little easier to comprehend though (it doesn't really make much of a difference to Advanced if you try hard enough).
Here are statistics from 2012:
For General Maths:
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/ebos/static/BDHSC_2012_12_15230.html
Less than 1800 people got a band 6 for it.
Whereas for 2-unit:
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/ebos/static/BDHSC_2012_12_15240.html
Over 3000 people got a band 6. However, the 2-unit candidature is almost half that of General. Also, in General, less students take it seriously, so the aligning is usually just as well. It is not a problem like with English.
The problem with General Mathematics is that the scaling is not too great for your ATAR whereas for the two English courses this is not a factor.
However, this problem is quite minimal, as an 80 in General compared to 2-unit would get you around 8/100 aggregate less. Comparing 70 in both, and the aggregate in general is approximately 15/100 less than that of 2-unit. However, comparing to a 90 in both, general will scale 4/100 aggregate less than 2-unit, which is fairly minimal.
So I would say dropping down to General Mathematics is not as bad as dropping down to Standard English in terms of difficulties and effort. I know people who did General and got around 85, but they were not as good at maths and getting lower in class marks than a student who ended up with 75 in 2-unit, so their choice of moving down actually helped their ATAR a bit.
But then again, there are cases of when a student could have been capable to get higher in 2-unit, so it depends on the student's situation really.
This is pretty much my line of thinking when it comes to Standard. Ultimately, Standard isnt much easier and given the difference in aligning, it isnt worth dropping down.
This is the main advantage of why it is better to stay in Advanced now.