definitely didn't give me a worse mark - you have to adapt your answer ot the question (which I did with the first and last sentence, and one in the middle mostly) - the content you use will mostly remain the same. I just found myself more confident ot get out 3 hours in two hours (our old paper...
id guess my raw mx1 external was 81 or so, and rank was probably 4-5/15. we had 5 or so strong kids at the top of the class (inadvertently putting myself in that list : ))
just work hard and do your best in the hsc exams. what else are you supposed to do? you cant control what other people will do, you cant control the moderation process, you cant control the exams that nesa will produce. focus on what you can control, and believe that you can in fact do it.
p.s...
Start spamming past papers, that was my main strategy. I tried to save the HSC papers to later into my study and started off with jrhs, baulko, sgs etc trial papers. I'd save 2022 hsc for your last practice paper. For english I just crammed it in the 7 days before the exam, took breaks by doing...