VCE Units 3 & 4 · Victoria

Physics Scaling VCE 2026: Raw to Scaled

VCE Physics scales up in Victoria. Physics scales up. In the 2025 VTAC scaling report a raw study score of 30 scaled to 32.

What the 2025 VTAC report shows

Raw 30 → scaled 32

Study scores run 0–50, and VTAC's scaled study score can reach 55. This is the report's own conversion for a raw score of 30. It describes the 2025 cohort. Scaling is recalculated every year, so it is not a prediction of what your result will do.

You can't change the scaling. You can change the raw mark.

Scaling is decided by your cohort, after the exam, and nothing you do moves it. The raw mark is the only part of this you control — and the Physics hub is 20 full-length model exams with mark-by-mark answer guides, revision notes, practice questions and flashcards, built for exactly that.

Preview Physics free →VTAC ATAR calculator

The hub shows a sample revision note extract, one full exam question with its worked answer and the complete list of every exam and note title — no account needed to look around. Unlocking Physics for life is $20 once, or $50 for any three subjects. See what's included →

What Physics actually asks of you

VCAA sets a single end-of-year examination, listed simply as the Exam for each year from 2017 onwards. Section A is a run of one-mark multiple-choice items sampled across every area of study, including the inquiry skills. Section B holds the bulk of the paper: short-answer and extended-response questions ranging from two-mark explanations up to a large item built around a practical investigation — in 2025 that single question was worth 20 marks. Section B answers are marked on the working and reasoning shown, not only the final value.

The Physics exam is Thu 12 Nov 2026, 9:00 am (2 hours 45 minutes (9:00am–11:45am, includes 15 min reading time)). Source: VCE timetable.

The 5 areas of study you are examined on

From the VCE Physics Study Design (Units 3 & 4, 2024–2027).

How do physicists explain motion in two dimensions?
This area of study takes Newton's laws off the straight line and into two dimensions. You apply them to linear and accelerated motion, to objects on inclined planes, and to uniform circular motion in both the horizontal plane (a car cornering, a banked track) and the vertical plane, where the net force changes relative to weight at the top and bottom of the circle. Projectile motion near Earth's surface is treated by separating independent horizontal and vertical components. The second half is the conservation toolkit: momentum and its conservation in collisions, impulse as the change in momentum and as the area under a force-time graph, and energy transformations between kinetic, elastic potential and gravitational potential energy, including elastic and inelastic collisions where kinetic energy is not conserved.
In the exam: Expect multi-part Section B problems that mix a calculation with a justification: find a fall time and impact speed, then explain what changes if the object is launched horizontally; calculate an impulse, then reason about why an airbag reduces the peak force. Force diagrams, gradient and area readings from graphs, and "show that" verifications of a supplied value are all common.
Where marks go missing: Treating momentum as a scalar — adding speeds instead of signed velocities, or quoting an impulse with no direction. The companion error is assuming kinetic energy is conserved in a collision when only momentum is, which quietly wrecks every later part of the question.
How do things move without contact?
Here you learn to describe action at a distance with field models, and to see what gravitational, electric and magnetic fields have in common and where they differ. You draw and interpret field patterns, apply the inverse square law to the field around a point charge or point mass, and superimpose the fields of two charges vectorially to find the net field, including the point where it cancels. Charged particles are then set moving through fields: accelerated between charged plates in a uniform electric field, and forced into circular paths in a magnetic field. The same physics explains the force on a current-carrying conductor, the operation of DC motors and particle accelerators, and satellites held in orbit by gravity, where the gravitational force supplies the centripetal acceleration.
In the exam: Section A items test conceptual discrimination — static versus non-uniform fields, field-line patterns, whether gravity does net work over a full orbit. Section B asks you to verify a field strength, add two fields at a point, find the direction of a force with a hand rule, calculate an orbital period or path radius, and explain orbital motion in terms of Newton's laws rather than restating the formula.
Where marks go missing: Mixing up the two field geometries: applying E = V/d to a point charge, or the inverse square law between parallel plates. Direction errors follow close behind — forgetting that an electron's force is opposite to the field, or to the direction a right-hand rule gives.
How are fields used in electricity generation?
This area of study connects the field models to the electricity supply. You start with electromagnetic induction: magnetic flux through a coil, Faraday's law linking induced EMF to the rate of change of that flux, and Lenz's law fixing the direction of the induced current so that it opposes the change producing it. From there you work through the AC generator — how flux through a rotating coil varies, where in the rotation the EMF peaks, and how a commutator changes the output. You then handle alternating voltage and current quantitatively using peak and RMS values, compare AC and DC supplies delivering the same power, and finish with transformers and the transmission problem: stepping voltage up to cut the current, reducing power lost as heat in the transmission lines, then stepping it back down for use.
In the exam: Typical questions ask you to explain the induced current as a magnet falls through a solenoid and why the entry and exit EMF spikes differ, to verify a flux change and calculate the EMF over a quarter turn, or to work through currents drawn by parallel loads and justify where step-up and step-down transformers belong in a supply chain.
Where marks go missing: Quoting Lenz's law as "it opposes the change" without naming which change, and treating induced EMF as proportional to the flux itself rather than to its rate of change — so a coil sitting in a strong steady field is wrongly said to generate a voltage.
How has understanding about the physical world changed?
This area of study follows two ideas that broke classical physics. The first is the nature of light and matter: interference and diffraction establish light as a wave, then the photoelectric effect and atomic spectra force quantisation, with photon energy set by frequency and the work function setting the threshold. De Broglie's wavelength then runs the argument backwards, since electrons diffract like X-rays of similar wavelength, giving wave-particle duality. The second is special relativity: Einstein's two postulates, what counts as an inertial frame, and the consequences when the speed of light is the same for all observers — time dilation, length contraction measured in the frame that sees the object move, and mass-energy equivalence. Michelson-Morley and the muon are the standard pieces of supporting evidence.
In the exam: You will be asked to extract Planck's constant and a work function from a kinetic-energy-versus-frequency graph, to calculate slit separation from a fringe pattern and predict the effect of changing frequency, to find an accelerating voltage for a target de Broglie wavelength, and to compute a contracted length or a relative speed while stating clearly which observer measures what.
Where marks go missing: Assigning proper time or proper length to the wrong observer, so the contraction or dilation is applied backwards. In quantum questions, the parallel slip is arguing from intensity when only frequency determines whether photoelectrons are emitted at all.
How is scientific inquiry used to investigate fields, motion or light?
This is the practical investigation area of study, and it is examinable in its own right rather than being a report of your own experiment. You need to be fluent with the design of an investigation: identifying independent, dependent and controlled variables, choosing a method and equipment that actually isolate the relationship being tested, and recognising the difference between systematic error, which shifts every reading in one direction, and random error, which scatters them. You also need the analysis skills: plotting data with uncertainty bars, drawing a line of best fit, reading a gradient and an intercept and interpreting what each represents physically, linearising a relationship so a curved data set becomes a straight line, and evaluating accuracy, precision and the limitations of a method. Scientific poster conventions for communicating findings are part of the study design.
In the exam: Section A items classify described errors as systematic or random or ask which pair of variables plots as a straight line through the origin. The extended Section B investigation question walks through a whole experiment: naming variables, justifying design decisions, plotting supplied data, finding a gradient, and using that gradient to calculate a physical quantity such as magnetic field strength.
Where marks go missing: Writing "human error" or "the equipment was inaccurate" instead of naming a specific systematic or random effect and stating what it does to the graph — whether it shifts the intercept or scatters points — and therefore what it does to the quantity calculated from the gradient.

Full Physics study-design guide →

How scaling works in Victoria

In Victoria, VCAA gives you a raw study score out of 50 for each study. VTAC then scales it. Scaling looks at how students in that study performed across all their other studies: if a study's cohort tends to do well elsewhere, the study is treated as more competitive and its scores are adjusted upward, and if the cohort tends to do less well elsewhere, scores are adjusted downward. The result is a scaled study score between 0 and 55. VTAC then builds your aggregate from an English study, which is compulsory, plus your three next-highest scaled scores, plus 10 per cent of a fifth and sixth scaled score. Aggregates are ranked across the state and converted to an ATAR. Scaling is recalculated every year, so it is never fixed.

Source: official VTAC scaling report (PDF). Last checked 2026-08-18.

What scaling is not

Scaling is not a difficulty rating and it is not a bonus. It compares how the students in one subject performed across every other subject they took, so a subject scales up because of its cohort, not because of the paper. The consequence is practical: you cannot scale your way out of a weak result. The only lever you control is the raw mark, and the fastest way to move that is full-length timed practice against the real exam format.

VCE Physics practice exams VTAC ATAR calculator

Questions

Does VCE Physics scale up or down?

Physics scales up. In the 2025 VTAC scaling report a raw study score of 30 scaled to 32.

How does subject scaling work in Victoria?

Should I choose Physics because of how it scales?

Scaling adjusts a whole cohort, not one student, so choosing a subject you will struggle in because it scales up is usually a worse trade than doing well in one that scales down. Check the prerequisites for the course you want first, then your interest and workload, and treat scaling as a tie-breaker. Scaling is also recalculated every year, so the figures in any report describe a past cohort rather than the year you are sitting.