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March 29, 2024, 01:49:12 am

Author Topic: Internal rankings not going well  (Read 814 times)

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mellowfellow

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Internal rankings not going well
« on: May 28, 2020, 04:01:27 am »
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Hellooo

I go to a school that's ranked in the top 10, but my ranks for many of the subjects I do aren't good. Do you think it's still possible to get a 98 ATAR and should I drop 4 units of maths? I don't find the work too challenging, I'm just super slow in maths exams and hence don't get very good marks though I do usually understand the content :(

Here are my ranks
English advanced - 80/160
English extension 1 - 20/90
Modern history - 25/30
Music 1 - 2/5
3U maths - 110/140
4U maths - 83/85 ;(

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks :)

fun_jirachi

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Re: Internal rankings not going well
« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2020, 10:39:16 pm »
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Welcome to the forums!

It's still quite early in the academic year, and there's plenty of time left to make an impact on your ranks and marks. As such, it's possible to get a 98 ATAR. It just seriously depends on how motivated you are and the work you put in, in that order. While it has been hard to self-motivate under the circumstances, it's important that you keep pushing and trust yourself to get there :)

Dropping Extension 2 Maths - it depends less on your marks and ranks and more on a) how happy you are doing the subject and b) how much effort you're willing to put in. If you're positive that you're cool with the content, it's not too much work and it brings mental benefits to your learning experience, by all means, keep going. I think if both caveats aren't fulfilled, dropping is something benefits you as it will also negatively impact your other subjects.

A few pointers with speeding up in exams:
- Temper accuracy with speed; don't slow down for the sake of ensuring to an excessive degree that your answers are correct.
- If you understand the content, it's more important that you practice huge amounts of questions. While resources may be fairly thin at the moment, look for what resources are currently available or were common with the old syllabus - this will get you to speed up the link between course content and the solution for each question
- Look to speedrun the easier questions towards the beginning which are generally a little vanilla (eg. complex number arithmetic) to make time for the more difficult questions which are harder to see towards the end
- Use your reading time well - something I did was read from back to front. I used to solve MC in reading time, but it really cost me towards the end of the exam and I missed lots of marks towards the end because I had read none of the other questions. After switching to reading back to front, my marks and ranks improved drastically (jumped from barely above average marks to some of the best in the cohort). Reading back to front has to be done well though - I looked for questions where I could go 'I know how to do that' and moved on with reading other questions. If I couldn't 'see' how to do a question in reading time, I moved on to reading another one. This ensures you read the whole paper :)

If there's anything else, feel free to ask in this thread! For any course-related questions you may have, ask them here in the corresponding threads/boards. Hope this helps :)
Spoiler
HSC 2018: Mod Hist [88] | 2U Maths [98]
HSC 2019: Physics [92] | Chemistry [93] | English Adv [87] | 3U Maths [98] | 4U Maths [97]
ATAR: 99.05

UCAT: 3310 - VR [740] | DM [890] | QR [880] | AR [800]
Guide Links:
Subject Acceleration (2018)
UCAT Question Compilation/FAQ (2020)
Asking good questions