Representations are an integral component of organic chemistry education and practice. Learning how to visualize and reason effectively with a variety of representations is essential for learners to succeed. However, developing the necessary representational competence skills (e.g., the ability to interpret, translate between, and use representations) poses a challenge for learners. Previous studies have found nuanced results when examining the relationship between learners' knowledge and skills related to representations and the overall course grade or individual examination grades. However, much of this prior work has primarily focused on visuospatial skills that were measured by using tools tangential to their application in chemistry contexts. Our work addresses this limitation by capturing the relationship between examination performance and representational competence using the Organic chemistry Representational Competence Assessment (ORCA), which specifically evaluates the learners' ability to apply representational skills in chemistry contexts. We use ORCA to evaluate the representational competence of 717 learners across the first semester of a year-long organic chemistry course sequence using a reciprocal causation model. Findings suggest that a clear relationship exists between representational competence skills and examination performance at the beginning of the course sequence, when these skills are explicitly assessed. However, this relationship weakens over time as representational competence skills become more implicitly assessed. These results highlight the need for explicit instruction and targeted interventions to foster the development of representational competence and reinforce its importance throughout the curriculum. More broadly, we encourage instructors and researchers to reflect upon and discuss the role of representations and representational competence in advancing chemical understanding.