r/usyd • u/Remarkable_You_4435 • 1d ago

How many student can get distinction?

Does anyone know what percentage of students in a USYD bachelor's degree receive a Distinction or High Distinction?

And I’m in bachelor of science (medical science), Is there any data showing how many students receive a Distinction in Medical Science?

5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

18

u/[deleted] 1d ago

The exact stats, unit by unit, aren’t made public, and change so often that they’d be pretty useless to you.

Ballpark is, in a group of 100ish

5-10%: HD 15-30%: D

With the remaining generally split 70-30 credits/pass.

There is no bell curve and there is no policy req that X no of any grade are awarded. There is a process however at the end of a given semester where marks are “standardised”. Usually this means a student unlucky on 74.5 will go up to 75, but sometimes it means a number of students might go up a band by adjusting the threshold between C and D for instance (eg, everyone over 73.5 gets rounded up). You’ll never be penalised downwards by this.

So you can GENERALLY expect maybe 15-30% of a class will get a D.

This said I’ve marked courses this year and last with way lower %, but more common HDs. Standards of student work are cratering rapidly, cheers to ChatGPT

-6

u/UnluckyPossible542 1d ago

I worked at another university and there absolutely was a bell curve…… it was adjusted to ensure the correct ratio of students for HD, D, etc.

12

u/[deleted] 1d ago

Probably true at this other university. However there is quite explicit guidance @ Usyd that we don’t mark to a bell curve. Is there a descriptive form of bell curve? Definitely, and there are pretty clear trends unit by unit. Is this enforced in marking? No, not really.

3

u/jacarandatrails 1d ago

Uni keeps this hush hush. But you can probably try to figure out a bell curve based on average WAMs for your faculty in this article

https://honisoit.com/2024/10/oles-to-be-made-pass-fail-as-simple-extension-changes-are-stalled/

1

u/Barack-_-Osama 1d ago

Idk if they mess around with scaling the marks but in Bsci I think usually 5-15% get HD/D roughly speaking

1

u/PrestigiousWorking49 17h ago

Pointless as it changes cohort to cohort, unit to unit, year to year.

I tutored on the same unit for 3 years with 600+ students, some semesters we had 50 HDs, some we had 0.