The Long Haul: A Journey From Average Marks to an English State Rank and 99.30 ATAR

Hi! I’m Meerab, an Opus English tutor and avid literature fanatic, and I’m here to tell you that success in HSC English is not a one-size-fits-all process; you absolutely do not have to have always been a top student to achieve top marks. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret–in my opinion and experience, success in HSC English boils down to one thing; motivation. For me personally, my motivation was my greatest ally during my study of English. 

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I was hardly a star student. Hell, English isn’t even my first language, but I grew to love it with my whole heart, and I owe my achievements to that fact. Year 12 felt like possibly the longest year of my life, having to juggle 4 units of English alongside 4 units of Maths and two additional major works. And while I gave those other subjects my love in their own right, it was English that I excelled in, graduating with a state rank in English Advanced, E4s in Extension 1 and 2, and a 99.30 ATAR. 

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Here’s a shortcut to the lessons I learned the hard (ish) way so you don’t have to.  

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Who are you writing for? 

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The first embers of motivation were sparked for me in year 9, when I found myself in the 2nd top English class in my cohort. Prior to that, I had been a B range student, and thus went into the year hoping for nothing more but to maintain that mark range. 

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This is where I impart to you my first piece of advice; find something that sparks your passion for the subject and harness that passion as fuel. 

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For me, this had been my English teacher for the duration of years 9 and 10, who was the kind of person who took a genuine interest in every idea that popped into my head. As an impressionable 13 year old girl who had just begun to consider honing my writing skills, this made me feel like Emily Dickinson with my quill, a bottomless pot of ink, and a radical mind. And so every piece of writing that I produced that year had been written with my teacher in mind, as a figurative audience of sorts for whom I wanted to write something worth reading. 

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Tip 1: Identify an audience for yourself

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It may sound cliche to tell you to find something that sparks your passion, but humour me for a second. Unorthodox as it may be, I recommend finding something or someone to anchor your motivation on. Whether that be a teacher, a tutor, family member, friend, yourself or even anonymous readers online. Look beyond the assessment grade and create for yourself a new end goal.

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For many students, it's difficult to find motivation to work on an English assignment with the threat of a bad mark looming over your head. The easiest way to combat this is to write not as a means to an end, but as a means to express yourself, to exhibit what it is you want to exhibit to the target audience that you have identified for yourself. Although seemingly basic, this mindset had a monumental impact on my English skills, taking me from a B range to an A range within a few terms. 

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What are you writing about? 

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It is definitely possible to excel in English without loving it, maybe even without liking it, but I can tell you now that that approach is infinitely harder–enjoyment is personally what paved the path for my success in English. 

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Easier said than done, I know. Especially in a subject that many people struggle to maintain an interest in, myself included (Of Mice & Men and An Imaginary Life were trying times for me). 

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Year 10 taught me that you don’t have to limit yourself to the generic, broader ideas of a particular text. In fact, you’re more likely to perform better if you allow yourself to write about things that interest you. 

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 This leads me to my second big piece of advice – find an intersection between your interests and the demands of the course. 

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Tip 2: Source inspiration from your interests

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This is especially pertinent in creative writing, in which one of the biggest struggles is figuring out what to write about. You don’t necessarily have to write about the complexities of identity or the trials of youth  to perform well (though if you want to, by all means, go ahead). When looking for inspiration or a prompt or stimulus, I advise you to turn to your own interests and your hobbies to spark an idea for a piece of writing.

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I discovered this little trick in year 10, where I based the narrative of my imaginative task on one of the lyrics in Taylor Swift’s Coney Island. Now, my story itself had nothing to do with the subject of the song, but the inspiration for the narrative had been sparked by a line–“I’m sitting on a bench in Coney Island”, wherein the entirety of my narrative took place on a singular bench. This task was possibly one of the first in which I found myself really immersed in the world within my writing–an endeavor which was highly rewarding, as I received my first full marks for that year.

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Tip 3:  Don’t shackle yourself to ideas that don’t interest you

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Allowing your interests to fuel your writing doesn’t exclusively apply to creative writing, in fact, I found myself applying this ideology to every task I did from then onwards. Particularly when it came to analytical writing, I was often bored by archetypal heroes and cliches of identity. 

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This was most prominent in my study of Shakespeare’s Othello in year 10, where I found myself captivated far more by Desdemona’s struggle with female autonomy than the titular character himself. As an avid feminist in my everyday life, I could have done my critical study on Othello as a faulted, tragic hero and yet I chose to write about his androcentric, proprietary treatment of Desdemona instead. And inadvertently, by channeling my passions into my writing, I found myself enjoying essay writing for the very first time. With another set of full marks in that task, I was told by my teacher at the time that I had developed a strong “critical voice”, which I hadn’t even known was something I possessed. 

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This taught me that the strength of my critical voice was directly proportional to my passion for whatever I was writing, an awareness that carried onwards into senior high school. This theory was confirmed for me years later by my Year 12 English Extension 1 teacher – who upon reading my essay draft of a feminist criticism for the Reimagined Worlds module said to me “I can tell you had fun writing this”, which honestly opened my eyes. I was consistently scoring top marks and 1st ranks in Extension 1, as opposed to Advanced throughout Years 11 and 12, which didn’t make sense at all, as I was under the impression that Advanced was supposed to be easier than Extension. Looking back now, I think this gap was entirely due to the fact that I found Extension 1 content more enjoyable–which reiterates my biggest objective; to show you just how much of a difference the “passion factor” can make.

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Where do you want to take your writing?

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Years 11 and 12 are the most formative years of high school, especially in HSC English. For myself, these were the years where I had to really learn to confront the fact that the path to success was anything but linear.

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Year 11 found me placed in the top English Advanced class in my cohort, but my journey ahead would prove to be turbulent at best. 

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Tip 4: Prioritise the rubric and criteria

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This may not be the case for many people, but for myself, I was the kind of student that didn’t concern myself too much with the rubric and marking criteria of an English task. This fault became known to me in Year 11, when I saw the first dip in what had been so far a linear progression of my skills. 

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After having received a 24/25 in my Reading To Write creative task–in which I wrote an imaginative inspired by Disney’s Tangled, a testament to the fact that allowing your interests to fuel your writing really works (I later deployed this technique in my HSC Mod C discursive, written on the basis of a lyric in Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero)–I was ranked 3rd in the cohort. 

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However, I dropped to 11th by the end of the year due to a low mark in the Narratives That Shape Our World module. In my comparative study for that module, I had chosen to write a feminist criticism about the female love interests in both texts–which was a great approach to take, don’t get me wrong–but in doing so, I hadn’t prioritised the narrative events of the texts in my analysis, neglecting the purpose of storytelling and mimetic narratives that was required of the module.

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This experience opened my eyes to the importance of the rubric in the path to top marks, which in turn sparked a motivation to personally investigate and break down the Human Experiences module, where I consciously studied All The Light We Cannot See in Year 12 through the eyes of the rubric. This shift in motivation lent me full marks in my first assessment of Year 12, kicking off my HSC year with a 1st in course rank. 

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Tip 5: Recognise your weaknesses

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Learning to take constructive criticism is possibly the one piece of advice you’ll hear the most throughout your studies, but trust me when I say that it is absolutely integral to improvement. Throughout Year 12, I struggled on and off with my own stubbornness when it came to my writing–and I’ve long since learned that alongside your essay, you yourself have to be malleable and adaptable. 

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Okay, now to really drive my point home; success is not linear. Having just risen to the top from a relatively low point in Year 11, I plummeted to my lowest point yet in the second term of Year 12, thanks to King Henry IV Pt 1, dropping from 1st to 13th in the Critical Study of Literature. 

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There was one simple reason for this; I hadn’t responded to the question well enough in my Mod B exam. And there was an even simpler reason as to why that was; I married myself to my original ideas and refused to allow for change. My English Advanced teacher in Year 12 bore the brunt of my stubbornness, involving a very upsetting conversation with him during our lunch break about why I had lost those marks. The two of us repeated this dance during Module A, in which I had been working on a doubtlessly and unabashedly Pro-Plath, Anti-Hughes essay but was advised against writing such a biased piece in lieu of acknowledging the purpose of the Textual Conversations module.  

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Tip 6:  Put in the extra time to elevate your weaknesses to the level of your strengths 

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During the progression of the year, I had to confront and actively work against my own weaknesses.

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I vehemently practiced adapting my King Henry essay to various extraneous essay questions, especially those that had nothing to do with my own argument at all (Questions about Falstaff were particularly frustrating when my essay was exclusively focused on the triple H trio). 

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And upon discussion with my teacher, I had to reframe and rewrite a vast majority of my Plath & Hughes essay in order to respond appropriately to the module. This was particularly frustrating for me as I really struggled to envision the changes I was supposed to make, and had to seek further support by reaching out to my English Extension 2 teacher for additional advice on how to adjust my writing (side tip: be persistent about seeking feedback as it is so often the lifeblood to improvement and getting “unstuck”!). 

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However, by identifying modules A and B as my weakest, I allowed myself to put extra time and energy towards refining my skills in both, raveling and unraveling my writing over and over again throughout the course of the year. Eventually, this earned me a 20/20 in Module B and 19/20 in Module A in my Trials, as well as the highest mark in my cohort which earned me a 1st rank–and later, a 15th rank in the state of NSW. 

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That’s our happy ending to this story–and if you’d like to further discuss the trials and tribulations of the arduous odyssey that is HSC English, you can find me living out my happily ever after as a tutor at Opus English. 

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As I reach the end of this informational blog-turned-didactic autobiography of sorts, I hope that it can serve as a form of reassurance to any students who are struggling to see progress in this labyrinthine subject–or even worse, are under the mistaken impression that they won’t improve. 

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All of this to say, the biggest lesson that I learned from my study of HSC English is that high results are not a result of natural talent or consistent top marks (case in point; every anecdote above), but a result of a motivation to write, and write well. So I encourage you to seek out your own motivation and put in just that little bit of extra effort to consolidate it. Trust me, it’s worth it in the long run. 

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Best of luck with your studies!

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Meerab