Why getting your marks back is a good thing

We’ve all been there. The teacher hands out the marked papers and your heart drops. Faster than you can say mystery mark, you shove the marking sheet into the bottom of your crusty school bag never to be seen again. Or maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, the mark comes back and it’s a happy surprise. You show your Mum, try not to brag to your friends and eventually shove it into a folder and also never think about it again.

We believe the worst mistake you can make during the HSC is ignoring these marks. No matter what the number on the paper was, it is the best source you have for improving your marks. Every mark tells you something.

Here are our tips on how to listen to your marks to ensure HSC success!

1. Decide how you feel about them

Whilst it’s all well and good to have expectations about what you want to achieve in your HSC, those can be very different from the reality. Getting an exam mark back is the fastest and surest way to know what your expectations of yourself are.

If the paper lands on your desk and it’s an 18/20 and you’re angry, you have massively high expectations of yourself. I.e. you need to push yourself harder. If you get a 15/20 and are chuffed about it then lucky you, you’re right where you want to be.

The thing about getting marks back is that you can’t control, fake or hide how you feel about them. That initial knee jerk reaction tells you everything you need to know in terms of trying harder or pushing yourself further.

2. If your marks are bad

As we’ve said before marks are completely relative, so a ‘bad’ mark is one that doesn’t meet your own expectations or is far below that of the people around you.

But often bad marks tell you a lot more than good marks ever will. Put simply, getting shocking marks is a fast, albeit painful, way to show your weaknesses loud and clear. You get slapped in the face by reality and it’s almost as if the exam is screaming out to you ‘you need to study these topics more!’ or ‘you’re not good at long response answers, fix it!’

These things are really useful for you to know moving forward and you don’t have to do much more thinking about what you need to focus on more when you’re studying.

Also, terrible marks are a pretty clear indication that whatever you did to prepare for this assessment did not work. Whether you decided to try some funky new learning technique where you listen to your notes whilst you sleep or whether you just thought you could get it all done in one weekend, you definitely need to rethink your approach and change up your study method before the next assessment.

Getting things wrong is the best way to make sure you don’t get anything wrong next time.

3. If the marks are good

On the other hand, if you’re one of the lucky ones that did really well in the assessment you know the exact opposite things.

You know that you’re confident with that type of assessment, you know your content for those topics and you know that when you’re studying you probably don’t need to pay as much attention to those areas. Save your breath because you got this.

Another good thing is that you know whatever you did this time in terms of your prep, worked. All you have to do next time is rinse and repeat.

It’s a pretty good place to be.

4. Pick out the trends

By keeping tabs on how you are doing in each assessment and actually analysing how you went, you can actually pick up on a lot of trends that can inform how you study.

For example, if you notice that you keep running out of time in your maths papers, or that you seem to do really well in the 5-6 marker but you always get killed in the 15 marker. You could notice that questions on fraction in Chemistry always get you or that you always seem to be dropping your marks in multiple choice.

All these insights are gold! You can use these trends to see where you need to focus your energy and how you should be practising. If you’re losing marks on those 15 markers, guess what you should be doing for your study before the next exam...

5. It’s brutal and exposing

The best (and worst) thing about getting your marks back is that it’s brutal and it’s exposing. There is nowhere to run and hide and there is no way to deny it.

Like Phoebe in Friends says (watch from 0:55), you have to rip off the bandaid and expose the wound.

Once you’ve been shown exactly how bad/good you went there is nothing more motivating or clear. It shows you straight up whether you are on the track to your desired mark, whether you’re going to blitz it or whether you’ve got a lot more HSC Hub to be watching.

Once your shame has been shown, you can work on fixing it. So don’t crawl up in the corner wanting to die when you see your teacher walk in with that stack of exam papers. Embrace it.

Don’t let the paper get shoved into the bottom of your bag, but pull it out, open it and start analysing it as much as possible. You’ll thank yourself for it later on.

And don’t worry, all wounds eventually heal.