I’m a little disappointed with my TCE results 2008. It’s entirely my fault, because I just managed to do really, really badly on my external exams, the mythical places where careers are made and extinguished…
In my case, the flames were pretty much put out permanently. Okay – so maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was ridiculously worse than I was expecting.
After having a bit of a mull-over for a couple of days/weeks/months (years, even) I’ve come to the realisation that your TER/ENTER/UAI (Tertiary Entrance Rank [SA, TAS, NT], Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank [Vic] Universities Admission Index [NSW]), while important to what courses you want to do at Uni, isn’t a definite sign of who you are, or what you want to be.
As a side note, Queensland also use something else, but it’s called the OP (Overall Position) and it’s really weird compared to the TER/ENTER/UAI. Instead of being a percentage-based score, the OP is a number from 1 to 25, where 1 is “You’re awesome at academics”, and 25 is “You’re not-so-awesome at academics”. Multiple inter- and intra- school scalings are taken into consideration, but in this blogger’s opinion, it Just Doesn’t WorkTM.
The TER isn’t a measure of how intelligent you are (that’s your IQ, folks), or how “street smart” you are. Far from it, it’s more a measure of how well you did compared to your peers. If you take that literally, it’s a measure of how you stack up against your fellow students – which is something that can be influenced by heaps and heaps of different factors like subject choices, aptitudes, and a whole lots of other stuff I won’t bother to name here.
I think my main cause of concern was that I wasn’t in the top 10% of the state. Yeah, that was probably it – NOT! I care not whether I was in the top 10% of the state or not. I’m heaps glad for those select few who are in the top 100, so congrats to Ellen and Elise, but really – that doesn’t matter.
I guess I’m just disappointed about my whole performance overall. I know I completely screwed up my exams, and that just really sucks!
If I tell you the truth (I do always try to), then I guess that arrogance played a part in this. Either I had the arrogance to think that I was going to do spectacularly in the exam (and I had reason to think so, with one B internally and the rest As), or I was just arrogant enough to think that I would do well without adequete study. Neither are particularly pleasant options, but hey, I guess that’s life…
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