to vanshetec. Listen matey, i'll try explain to you to in the easiest possible way. In first, your school rank DEFINITELY matters, dont listen to those idiots who say 'just do well in the HSC(external)' because if you dont do well in your internal (school assessments), it's going to drag your overall mark down.
Because there's so much discrepancies between all the schools around NSW, the 'internal' mark cannot be given to you as a raw mark. Why? For eg. Let's say James ruse sets hard exams all year round and the guy who tops the year gets a final mark of 80/100. Another derro country-school make very easy exams all year round and the guy who tops the year gets a final mark of 80/100. Does that mean they are both equal? Of course not. Thus, they use the HSC to determine the final mark from your ranks. I'll give you a scenario to explain to you.
Random High School
INTERNAL RANK -----------------------------HSC EXAM (EXTERNAL RANK AND MARK)
1. John 79 ------------------------------------ 1. Jack 96
2. Jack 78 --------------------------------------2. Jill 93
3. Jill 76 ----------------------------------------3. John 90
Take the above scenario for example. the internal marks show about they are all about high 70s. However, in the external we see they all got band 6 marks. Which means that their internal exams were very hard and their estimates were much lower. Let's take JACK for example from random high school. As you know HSC final mark is 50% external and 50% internal. He came 2nd in the internal rankings and he came 1st in the external. The mark he gets in the HSC EXAM of 96, he will keep because that's his mark. How about the other half of his marks? Since he came 2nd in the internals, his other 50% (internal) will be Jill's HSC mark of 93 (since Jill came 2nd). Therefore, 96+93 / 2 = 94.5 which will round up to 95. That's how your final mark is determined.
So in the end, it's crucial that your internal rank is VERY high because your internal 50% will be determined by another school student.
People say going to a selective school or private school 'scales you up'. There's no such a thing as scales you up. The subject 'scaling' is determined by the whole state and how YOU did relative to the whole state in the respective subject. However, going to a smarter school like James ruse is helpful because the competition is always CRAZY so all the marks will be bunched up together. So at James ruse, coming 1st or 20th may only have a mark difference of 2 as opposed to some other random school whose mark difference might be 10 between 1st and 20th. That's the only good thing about going to a selective school, having closer marks together will boost up your 50% internal mark. That's the reason why you trade notes and essays after your trial exams so your whole cohort can do WELL together to boost all the marks up in the HSC. This idea is always taken to be 'going to a better school scales you up' which is ultimate BS. Biggest myth.
So conclusion? Just do well in every exam which will mean your rank will be higher, which will lead to a higher internal 50%.^^;