Because they ranked well at their school, and then also did well in their HSC exams? I mean even if their assessments were easier, I'm not trying to say that they're not as smart as someone who did well on a harder test. They just won't have the chance to show it through that exam, thus the HSC...
But the higher the school rank - the harder the assessments.
If they gave easy assessments at James Ruse, then everyone would be getting 100% and it'd be hard to rank everyone.
Also at higher rank schools you tend to learn more because everyone is smarter (generalising here, I'm sure there are...
Ah well they're useless in a sense, but like the other people have been saying even if you're ranked 7/10, it can still be good if the people coming 1-6 have marks that are close to yours.
And yeah they will look at the space between each of the marks, as in person A gets 90%, person B gets 80%...
What you have to understand is that your marks mean nothing - its the RANK thats the only thing that matters.
A 80% at a rank 200 school is not the same as an 80% at James Ruse, if you get what I'm saying :)
I would've thought that since person 2 is so close to person 1, their internal marks would be close together? Doesn't sound fair if person 2 got 94 and then it got moderated down to 80 or something