I really don't know how strong your cohort is but I hope I can help! I came near the top 1% of my school in semester 1 despite being like top 20% in year 8 last year.
From what I've learned, I think it's really important to know how does your school rank people! Do they rank by how many A+'s you get and give a point according to the grade and add them all up, or do they use GPA, or average mark for all your classes or something like that! I think it's pretty important to know so you can tackle and hack the system
For our school, we use the system where if you get 90+ for the class, you get 10 points, 85+ is 9 points and so on. The strategy I used last semester is that 90+ is enough! Don't be a perfectionism really...So I try to maintain an average of 90 across all my subjects and tell myself when I achieve 90 in one subject, I need to move on to the next one and make that a 90+ too and you'll find that you save sooo much time from trying to be perfect yet still rank pretty high up there!
If you use the average mark system, try to tackle your best subject and make that 100% although don't completely neglect your bad subjects! In primary school, I knew I was bad at Indonesian and Chinese but I'm pretty good at Science and Maths. So I always spend a bit more effort towards maths and science to make that 100 so that can pull up my average for Indonesian and Chinese! Although don't also make your bad subject too bad like a below 70 or something because it can be a bit hard to pull up your average if it's too low!
Good luck in your future studies! PM me if you have more questions!!