how could someone be first in the state when they weren't even first at school?
This can easily happen in school where the teachers don't set assessments and exams in any way similar to the HSC.
Example: my school has very strange assessmnets and marking schemes.
Assessment 1, although I didn't quite get to the top (~6th)
The half yearly exam gave us 20 questions and asked us 10 in the exam.
The third assessment, asked questions like "Deconstruct the question" for 3 marks and "Define the verb" for 2 marks requiring to identify the verb again and give the definition.
They took a past HSC question, instead of giving it 3 marks (original value) and keeping the marking scheme, they made it worth 6 marks and told us to produce our own marking scheme for 3 marks or so then asked us to answer the question for the 6 marks.
When I actually got my results back, they expected much more than the HSC would've - they expected all these strange things on top of the HSC marking scheme and my response had clearly satisfied all criteria of the HSC question.
Yeah, all that shit was worth around half the assessment which was weighing at 30%...
What a joke, now I'm not even in the top 10...great.