In Year 11 and 12, there is often so much anxiety around rankings and where you sit amongst your peers. I found that students often get caught up comparing themselves with other students, too often, rather than focusing on individual improvement and progress.

Internal rankings determine the school assessment mark that a student receives for a particular HSC subject. This obviously means that a student’s position in a cohort is important, but it doesn’t determine their whole mark for a subject. It accounts for 50%.

Panic can set in when a student receives a mark below their expectations for a particular internal assessment, and they think that it defines their entire outcome for the HSC for that subject. This is far from the truth. With the highest weighting possible for an internal assessment being typically 40% (for trials only), a strong exam can significantly improve a student’s position in the cohort, but a poorer assessment does not end opportunities, especially since most assessment weightings are 10-30%. Consistency is ultimately key to getting a good internal rank.

Rankings for a task are simply a measurement of a student’s position in the cohort at a certain point in time; a ranking for a specific task may not entirely reflect a student’s effort, improvement or potential. A more tangible way of measuring effort, improvement and potential will be to analyse the change in ranks across all internal assessments, which will be a key indicator for the direction the student is heading in for the HSC. Rankings might also not be an indicator of individual performance when in a particularly strong cohort, say, for example, a cohort of Extension 2 Maths students where all students are performing very well.

A key danger of rankings is that while they can motivate students to improve by comparing themselves relative to their peers, they can distract students from controlling what they can, which is improving as much as they possibly can and working hard. If a student can focus on improving their own marks, then the ranks will move in a similar direction.

While rankings are important, they are not everything. The students who can park rankings aside and focus on improvement throughout the HSC will be the ones who are the most successful.

Hayden McCarthy