How to Improve Your ATAR Before Final Exams

If you’re searching for how to improve your ATAR this close to exams, you can’t change everything, but you can still change a lot. Your school ranks are mostly set by now. Your exam results aren’t, and in most states they matter more than students realise. Here’s where to focus your remaining weeks.

What can still change

In NSW and Victoria, your school’s rank order is fixed by the time you sit your exams. NESA keeps the rank order your school submits, and the VCAA’s moderation process doesn’t change it either. What’s still in play is your exam performance, which is why the final weeks matter so much.

Why your exams count twice

For most HSC courses, the exam makes up half your HSC mark. NESA also uses your school group’s exam results to moderate the other half, which is your school assessment mark. Victoria works similarly. The VCAA moderates school-based assessment against exam scores across the state.

In practice, a strong exam lifts your own mark directly and also helps set the scale for everyone’s school marks in your group. Studying with classmates who take the same subject therefore helps you too.

Where to spend your time

Spread your time according to how your state calculates the ATAR. Effort on a subject that won’t count is effort lost.

In Victoria, your ATAR comes from English plus your next three best scaled scores, with only 10% of your fifth and sixth subjects added on. That means a gain in one of your top four subjects is worth far more than the same gain in your sixth.

In NSW, your ATAR uses your best 10 units, including two units of English. If one subject looks likely to drop out of your best 10, give your extra time to subjects that will definitely count.

For example: a Victorian student expects study scores of 35 in English, Methods, Chemistry and Biology, 30 in Psychology and 28 in Legal Studies. An extra week on Legal Studies adds only a fraction to their aggregate, since only 10% of it counts. The same week spent lifting Chemistry from 35 to 38 adds its full scaled value.

Study methods that work

A major review of learning research by Dunlosky and colleagues rated two techniques as most effective: practice testing (quizzing yourself) and distributed practice (spreading study out over time). Highlighting, rereading and summarising were rated low. Most students use those three anyway.

For the next few weeks, that means:

• Do full past papers under timed conditions, then mark them with the official marking guidelines.
• Keep an error log, and retest yourself on every mistake a few days later.
• Swap rereading your notes for answering questions from memory.
• Rotate subjects across each day rather than cramming one subject at a time.

Read the examiner reports for each subject, too. They explain where marks were lost and show how to improve your exam technique.

Sleep matters as well. Staying up late the night before an exam costs you more in recall than the extra study gains.

If something goes wrong on the day

Every state has a process for illness or misadventure during exams. In Victoria, for example, the VCAA can calculate a Derived Examination Score based on other evidence of your likely performance. Tell your school straight away if anything affects your exam, because these processes have strict deadlines.

The Bottom Line

Learning how to improve your ATAR this late comes down to choosing what to focus on. Put your time into the subjects that count most, practise with timed papers, test yourself instead of rereading, and protect your sleep. If you’d like to see how a few extra marks in one subject change your estimate, try our ATAR calculator. Treat the result as a rough guide rather than a promise.