It’s the dream of every little boy and girl that grows up in Queensland.

You wake up, a fresh and eager nine year old who’s diligently preparing for their upcoming Grade 5 spelling test, knowing that it might come up in a job interview one day.

Your mother puts Toasted TV on and encourages you to watch the latest episode of Ben 10 but you scream, throwing your cereal bowl against the wall. As you watch the milky remnants of your Milo cereal drip onto the carpet, you remind your mother that nothing is more important than preparing for spelling tests, primary school exams and later on… the greatest test of all… QCE assessments – which you must achieve 100% on at all costs.

Okay, so… that’s maybe a little bit OTT.

Maybe you didn’t want to get 100% on your QCE assessments as a nine year old, but now that you’re in QCE, it might be something you wish for.

In all honesty… getting 100% in assessments is probably going to be pretty pointless. The most important thing is to look after your ranking and rank as highly as possible in your cohort. Most of the time, you don’t need 100% to do that. Put it this way – I just took a quick survey of the four 99+ ATAR achievers active on my Messenger, and literally only one of them had ever got 100% on a Year 12 assessment, ever.

Nonetheless, here’s some advice.

STOP BEING STUPID – FOLLOW THE ADVICE YOU’VE ALREADY BEEN GIVEN

First thing’s first.

How many times have you been told to:

Eat breakfast every day
Sleep well
Exercise
Drink plenty of water
Take regular breaks
Study smart, not hard
Study consistently
Etc., etc., etc.?

And, how many times have you actually done those things?

Now, no judgment. I’m in my early 20s and don’t own a car, so I still sprint for the bus every morning because I can barely get myself out of bed on time. So like, I’m not telling you off for not doing those things because trust me… I don’t either. But if you want to get 100% in your assessments, or close to, you’re going to have to pay the price. 

The good news is that the ‘price’ you pay actually makes you a much healthier and more functional person.

99+ ATAR achievers have been shouting about the value of taking care of yourself and doing the basics well for years. Decades, even. And every year, a bunch of undernourished, sleep deprived, overworked and overstressed students ask “What am I possibly doing wrong?!”

The basics. That’s what you’re doing wrong. That’s what I’m doing wrong. That’s what virtually everyone is doing wrong!

If you want to get better and improve yourself and your grades heading into the rest of Year 12 – it’s time for you to go back to basics, and start doing the things that people have been telling you to do since the start of forever. Seriously – take care of yourself, and everything else will start to take care of itself.

DO THE SAME STUFF, EARLIER

A lot of you probably study pretty hard – so hard that you don’t even need to cram!

A week before an assessment, you get going. You revise a chapter, hit some practise questions, and bug your teacher, and the night before the assessment you lightly go over your notes.

That’s nice. That’s actually awesome. But think about it – what if you did this whole process, but started it a week earlier?

Like, what if you started two weeks before an assessment, did a week’s worth of work like you’re doing already, and then had a week for that learning to sink into your brain before you were actually tested on it?

You can’t even say this is too time consuming – because it takes the exact same amount of time as studying one week before the assessment anyway. The only difference is that you’re conducting that preparation earlier than you might have. In the lead up to the assessment, you’ve got an entire week to teach people what you’ve learned and clarify your own points of misunderstanding. You’ve got an entire week to actually realise that you know the content inside out, so by the time assessment day arrives you feel calm and you feel confident… because you expect to get 100% (or close to it). And why wouldn’t you? You’ve been thinking about every aspect of the content for more than a week!

HAVE THE HIGHEST STANDARDS

When you sit an assessment on a topic, you should be able to think to yourself “If I sat the exam only on the current topic, I would get an A+”.

If you stop thinking in terms of assessment standards – “I want to get 90% on this assessment or more!” and start thinking about what you’re capable of in an exam, your standards will begin to shift.

Think about it – it’s possible to get 90% in an assessment, but be completely unprepared to sit an exam on that topic at any minute. And if you’re not ready to sit an exam on a topic at any minute and get an A+, then you haven’t fully learned the topic to the standard expected of a QCE high-achiever, yet.

When you prepare for an assessment, you shouldn’t study to do well in the assessment. Instead, you should study to know the topic so intimately that you could ace the exam if you sat it tomorrow. If you take the latter approach, you will be forced to study differently. You’ll be forced to study better, smarter, and with more efficiency than you would if you maintained a short-term mindset.

One great example of this is the picture below – taken from a 2015 graduate’s study tracker. In this picture, you can see, the student has worked out what letter grade they would receive on a paper had it been the VCAA exam (they were a Victorian student). They’ve also worked out where they lost their marks and why.

Clearly, this student has taken a high-standards, long-term approach, and if you want to achieve close to 100% in your assessments… you should do the same.

CHEAT WITHOUT BREAKING ANY RULES.

Every time you go to school, you have access to the person who marks your internal assessments.

Imagine if a sportsperson had a big game coming up, and they had the opportunity to talk to the game’s umpire 5 days a week. They could ask the umpire how certain rules would be applied, what the umpire team would be focussing on in the upcoming game, whether the umpire had any advice on sports technique to avoid giving fouls to the opposition. In most sports, this would be against the rules – but it’s not in QCE!

You can talk to your teacher 5 days a week, and while you can’t actually ask them what’s on the assessment, you can ask them to help you achieve the best possible mark.

You can ask your teacher:

What areas you are weak in
To mark an essay
To mark short-answer questions
To give you advice on how to approach particular questions that might appear on the assessment
The best ways to study for the upcoming assessment

Seriously – it’s so basic, but so helpful that it’s almost like cheating. Except for the fact that it’s not cheating, because you’re actually only asking your teacher to do the thing they’re paid to do – teach you!

If you want to get 100% in assessments, change your habits. Stop only talking to your teacher in class, and start harassing them to ensure you have the biggest advantage possible.

HIT US UP ON ATAR NOTES.

On the ATAR Notes Forums, so much help is available to you 24/7.

If you want to get 100% on your internal assessments or exams… use and abuse our free services! When you can get free advice from 99+ ATAR achievers then, like… why wouldn’t you?

Talk soon! xoxo