How will this affect my score for methods

[Samueliscool223]

So I got back my first sac for methods, and did... well... meh. got a 90, despite studying for it a crap tonne. a few people who did less study managed to do better than me. this is because the SAC was really weird, there were a tonne of ambiguous short and long answer questions that were marked in a quite arbitrary fashion (my teacher even admitted the questions were designed to be confusing and ambiguous for whatever reason), and there was not a whole lot of challenging math, which is quite unconventional for methods, and was nothing like what I was expecting, hence my shitty score. Its quite frankly pointless to do this, I might add, as it doesnt really differentiate the top performing students from the less competent ones, which is the whole point of SACs. But anyway, my question is, will this damage my study score a lot? I think ill do well in the exam: im able to get most questions right on the past exams (including the tricky ones near the end in which only 3% of people or so got right, not trying to flex but yea im simply built different  ) though my friend said even if you ace the exam a high score is not possible if you have a low rank, as sacs carry a lot of weight and you must be at least 3rd to achieve 40+ (im rank 15 out of 88)... also he said that the people who got the highest marks are a bunch of bots that will perform (relative to sacs) poorly on the exam, which will, in essence, send a message to vcaa that the sacs were piss easy and subsequently result in everyones sac mark to drop by like 20%, cuz vcaa be a mf dog like that sometimes

methods is among the subjects i want and need to do pretty well in to get into my course so im understandably worried. . .
thanks in advance for responding.

[Orb]

I did the maths on this a while back but even if you were rank 88 (or last in your year) if you full mark the exam you'll get 45-47.

Obviously your rank is a lot better than that so the total impact will be even less.

40+ is 100% achievable

[Samueliscool223]

wait hold up,,, youre telling me u can be ranked last and get like 20% and still get a 45+ ss? wtf is the point of sacs then, if your sac ranking doesnt even affect your final subject score lmao

[Orb]

wait hold up,,, youre telling me u can be ranked last and get like 20% and still get a 45+ ss? wtf is the point of sacs then, if your sac ranking doesnt even affect your final subject score lmao

Well of course it does affect your final score, because the same exam score with Rank 1 SACs is a 50 + premiers, but if you're last it's a 45-47...

[Samueliscool223]

Well of course it does affect your final score, because the same exam score with Rank 1 SACs is a 50 + premiers, but if you're last it's a 45-47...

o, right
still its only a loss of 3 points, which is next to no difference... wouldve thought being last place would affect ur score a lot more than just 3 points. perhaps your calculations are incorrect? either that or my friend is grossly exaggerating the importance of SACs...

[Orb]

o, right
still its only a loss of 3 points, which is next to no difference... wouldve thought being last place would affect ur score a lot more than just 3 points. perhaps your calculations are incorrect? either that or my friend is grossly exaggerating the importance of SACs...

I made the assumption that you perfect scored the final exams (which in most years only 2-5 students in the state would be able to) which is an extreme hypothetical.

In most cases you'd be still able to get a 43-45 even if you were ranked very low in your cohort from a super strong exam performance. Also I personally disagree with that 3-5 study scores is 'next to no difference' - the gap is big enough that it usually represents many hours of hard painstaking commitment to the subject but each to their own