By Craig Butt
Nearly 13,000 students from 514 schools and institutions achieved one or more study scores of 40 or above in 107 VCE subjects offered this year.
To put that in perspective, that’s more than the total number of athletes who competed at this year’s Olympic Games in Paris, or about as many GPs as there are in Victoria, or almost enough people to fill Rod Laver Arena. Last year there were just under 12,000 who reached that benchmark.
You can search the honour roll by student name, school or by subject below for those who gave permission for their results to be published.
The study score a student receives for a subject is between 0 and 50. A score of 30 is the mean score and a score or 40 or above puts a student in the top 9 per cent of a subject’s cohort.
Getting a 40-plus score in one subject is a stellar achievement, but more than 4500 students managed to achieve such results in more than one area.
There were 8222 students whose names appear once in the honour roll for achieving one 40+ score this year, 2690 who recorded two 40+ scores, 1217 who managed three, 498 who excelled in four subjects and 115 who aced five.
One student, Maria Hanoun from Gilson College in Taylors Hill, in Melbourne’s north-west suburbs, took on six year 12 subjects in 2024 and achieved a 40+ score in all of them.
A perfect study score of 50 was achieved by 541 students in at least one subject this year, compared with 510 students who managed it last year.
There were 37 students who achieved two perfect scores, three students who posted three perfect scores and two students, Cayden Tan from Box Hill Secondary College and Joel Cheok from Camberwell Grammar School, who recorded four highest scores.
Joel Cheok from Camberwell Grammar School achieved perfect scores in four subjects.Credit: Jason South
Keep in mind that a study score is distinct from an ATAR, the rank out of 99.95 which is the culmination of results across multiple subjects and includes other weightings.
For some of 2024’s year 12 cohort, this isn’t the first time their names have appeared in the honour roll. Some who achieved a 40+ score in any final-year subjects they undertook in 2022 or 2023 would have appeared in the list for those years too.
There are 2605 students who achieved a 40+ score in 2024 who also achieved at least one 40+ score last year, and a further 60 who managed a 40+ score all the way back in 2022.
In each of the subjects that attract the most enrolments, there are more than 1000 high achievers. In English, 3051 students achieved a score of 40 or more, in general mathematics there were 2205, there were 1210 in psychology, 1167 in mathematical methods, and in biology there were 1083.
Some students opt to complete one or more final-year VCE subjects in year 10 or year 11, which means this honour roll is not a definitive list of their 40-plus scores, only the ones they achieved this year.
And not all students who achieved a score of 40 or above show up in the honour roll. At the start of the year, about 10 per cent of those enrolled in VCE subjects opt out of allowing their details to be published.
On Saturday morning, we will publish a second VCE interactive on The Age’s website that focuses on overall school results. This interactive will let you view key data about each school’s year 12 cohort this year, its median VCE study score and the percentage of its study scores that were 40 or above.
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