Everyone Else Seems to Be Doing Better Than You. They Aren't.

One of the most common things Year 12 students say, almost word for word:

"I see people around me getting in the 90's and even some 100's and that really demotivates me."

It comes up more than content questions do. And the standard reply — don't compare yourself to others — is true, useless, and impossible to actually do.

So instead, here's what's actually happening, and the one thing that does work.

You're comparing your inside to their outside

You have complete information about yourself. Every topic you haven't covered. Every session where you sat down for three hours and did nothing. Every SAC you think you got lucky on.

About everyone else, you have almost nothing — a mark they mentioned, a confident sentence in the corridor, an Instagram story of a desk at 11pm. You're comparing your full internal picture, including all the doubt, against someone's edited highlights.

That comparison was never going to come out in your favour. It doesn't come out in anyone's favour, which is why the person you're intimidated by is very likely intimidated by someone else.

The people you hear from are a biased sample

Think about who actually announces a mark.

People who do well tell you. People who don't, mostly don't. So the distribution you hear is not the distribution that exists — it's the top slice of it, repeated.

Same with study hours. "I did six hours yesterday" gets said out loud. "I opened my laptop and watched YouTube for three hours" does not, even though it's far more common. You're building your sense of normal from a sample that is systematically skewed upwards.

The loud ones are also not always accurate. Some of it is anxiety management — saying a big number to feel more in control. You're taking it as data.

Comparison fills a vacuum

Here's the part that actually matters.

Comparison gets loudest when you have no reliable read on your own progress. If you genuinely don't know whether you're on track — and most students don't, because "I've been studying a lot" isn't a measure — then your brain reaches for the only scoreboard available, which is other people.

That's why "stop comparing yourself" fails as advice. You can't remove the behaviour without replacing what it's doing. It's answering a real question: am I okay?

The replacement is a measure of your own that's specific enough to answer that question without reference to anyone else. Not "I feel behind", but:

• which topics in each subject you can do under exam conditions,
• which ones you can do with your notes open but not without,
• and which ones you haven't touched.

That list is uncomfortable the first time. It's also the only thing that turns am I okay into here's what I do tonight — and the second question is the one you can act on.

Three things that help in the meantime

Opt out of the mark conversation. "I'd rather not do marks" is a complete sentence. Say it once and people adjust. Several of them will be quietly grateful.

Be careful who you revise with. Some people genuinely help you think. Others are anxiety amplifiers with good intentions. You're allowed to study alone in the last few weeks.

Notice that the comparison is always upward. You never feel bad about the people doing less than you — your brain discards them instantly and only keeps the ones above you. That should tell you something about how much the feeling reflects reality.

The thing about rank

Yes, VCE involves ranking and scaling. Yes, in a sense you're competing.

But you're ranked against everyone in the state doing your subject — tens of thousands of people you will never meet — not against the four people sitting near you. Beating your friend's SAC mark changes nothing about your study score. And more to the point: nothing about their result tells you what to study tonight. It's information you can't act on, which is the definition of a distraction.

The bottom line

The people around you are not doing as well as you think, you're hearing a filtered version of reality, and the comparison is loudest precisely when you have no measure of your own.

So get a measure of your own. Which topics are solid, which are shaky, which are untouched. Then the question stops being how am I doing compared to them and starts being what do I do next — which is both answerable and useful.