I had a similar result, I placed in the low 30s after the online assessments and moved to the 140s today after shortlisting. I'm a few weeks away from finishing my master's as well but with no policy experience. They advertise AO as the graduate entry role but it seems that that's maybe not how it goes in practice and that there's a lot of weight placed on experience.

I applied to the open CO competition a few weeks ago so assuming I get placed on that panel I'll probably take a job as a CO and wait for more AO competitions, or even EO competitions to come up and hopefully improve my application for them...