You are all wrong!
No courses are capped in that manner!
It is possible to achieve Band 6 in English (Std), but as instinct's teacher said, it is difficult! This difficulty is not intentionally imposed by the Board to disadvantage Standard students but rather stems from the fact that the Standard course examines different outcomes to the Advanced course, and most students (or all, as in the case of last year) are simply not proficient enough to perform at that level!
There is nothing that prevents Standard students from gaining higher marks than Advanced students! That's just blatantly wrong, and shows a complete misunderstanding of how the system works.
Even in the Advanced course, only 4.35% of the students were in Band 6.
You need to also remember that bands have nothing to do with your UAI! HSC marks in different courses cannot be compared and the percentages of students in each performance band will differ across all courses.
UAIs are not based on the reported HSC marks that have been aligned to the performance bands, but are instead calculated from raw HSC marks (a raw HSC mark is the average of the raw mark gained in the examination and a school assessment that has been statistically moderated by raw examination marks).
Changes in the way that the Board reports HSC marks has no effect on UAIs.
There is no difference in scaling between the Standard and Advanced courses.
You may suddenly cry out and say, "Hey! But what about the data from that percentile table? What about LazSeeker results? And that list of scaled courses??". The data in the UAC percentile table compares aligned HSC marks to scaled HSC marks. The aligned HSC marks for the Standard and Advanced courses are different - they have different outcomes. Advanced students on a raw mark received a higher aligned mark than Standard students on the same raw mark. Consequently an aligned HSC mark corresponds to different scaled marks for
Standard and Advanced students. However, the UAI is based on raw HSC marks, and sidesteps the Board's alignment procedure, which ultimately gives Standard and Advanced students the same scaled mark if they had the same raw mark. Both the Standard and Advanced are scaled together as if it was a single course.
LazSeeker converts aligned HSC marks to scaled HSC marks, and so there appears to be an apparent discrepancy - but there is not.
The list of scaled courses is taken from the data in the UAC percentile table, and even though the Standard and Advanced courses were scaled together, students who undertook Standard ended up with a lower scaled mean than those who did Advanced. This was not predetermined. It is merely a reflection of the poor performance of Standard students in 2001.
The lack of Standard students in Band 6 and the small proportion of Standard students in Band 5 were entirely consistent with the performance of Standard students on the common 'Area of Study' paper. Few Standard students received high marks on the common paper and, as markers were unaware of which scripts were from Standard students and which were from Advanced students, there was no bias in the marking of this paper that disadvantaged Standard students.
Please banish the myth from your mind.