The 20-mark essay question in this year’s HSC English 1 paper asked students to “analyse how the representation of particular lives in your prescribed text enriches your understanding of the endurance of the human spirit”.
But in the final moments of Thursday’s exam, Cumberland high school pupils in Sydney were living out their own story of endurance; their desks strewn with papers, their shoulders hunched forward, leavers jerseys hanging off chairs.
As the clock ticked over to 11.30am, there were visible sighs of relief as students closed the booklet on the first of this year’s HSC exams.
“It was down to the last minute, essentially,” says year 12 student Abby Meguerditchian of the English advanced paper, although she says she was able to divide her time between short and long answer sections.
Students in both English advanced and standard answered a long-format essay question on a prescribed text and five short-answer questions on unseen texts.
This year, the prescribed texts included works by Australian authors Amanda Lohrey, Favel Parrett and Tim Winton, poet Rosemary Dobson, as well as playwright and Muruwari woman Jane Harrison’s play Rainbow’s End, and Malala Yousafzai’s memoir I Am Malala.
The unseen texts included extracts from Australian author Andrew Pippos and Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults.
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It also included an extract from writer, social worker and Guardian Australia contributor Deirdre Fidge, in which she waxes lyrical about 1990s animated character She-Ra, an “eight-foot-tall cartoon superhero with long blonde hair and a flying unicorn sidekick”.
“She-Ra was made for me and my sister – freakishly blonde kids with unicorn obsessions,” Fidge writes.
This exam, which is no stranger to controversy, did not include an image prompt this year, to Meguerditchian’s disappointment. Student debriefs on social media took issue with the way the exam was stapled, with one TikTok user saying it took “five mins [sic] to turn a single page”.
Others complained about the essay prompt, when many had been hoping to answer on “anomalies, inconsistencies and paradoxes”.
Meguerditchian was one of the more than 74,700 students on track to complete their HSC this year, the biggest ever cohort, according to the New South Wales Education Standards Authority (Nesa).
An additional 9,179 students, most of them not in year 12, are also taking subjects.
Across NSW, Thursday marked the beginning of four weeks of sit-down papers – 123 in total or about 350 hours – with paper 1 in the compulsory English subjects the first up.
Luke Fulwood, Cumberland’s principal and a former English and drama teacher, says he likes to reassure students to stick to what they know from the trial exams.
And they were careful not to change up their pre-exam routines on Thursday, even if they lost some sleep overnight.
“I had Weet-Bix this morning,” says Vritika Sharma, who is happy with how she answered the essay question.
Ryan Sardelich, who took the English standard paper, had “a homemade meal”, with similar results.
“[My] short answers were a bit questionable at times, but the essay was good.”
‘A good night’s sleep and a good breakfast’
At Cumberland, Thursday was a first for more than one reason. The school is undergoing a multimillion-dollar refurbishment and the English exam was the first time the hall has been used for the HSC.
Sharma says: “Walking in and seeing all the desks lined up just kind of made it a bit more real.”
It’s one of more than 750 exam centres across NSW this year, managed by about 7,500 staff. Fulwood, who used to mark the English paper 1, says he still can’t help having a look at the questions afterwards.
In English, there’s little reprieve this year, with paper 2 following hard on Friday morning.
After that, camping trips, schoolies and the future.
Most students completing the HSC this year started their 13 years of schooling in 2013. The Nesa chief executive, Paul Martin, told reporters on Thursday that this year’s cohort “began year 7 wearing masks in the pandemic”.
HSC results will be released on Thursday 18 December.
