Weet-Bix and a homemade meal: anxious students stick to tried and tested rituals as record numbers begin HSC exams

In the pristine new hall at Cumberland high school in Sydney, the pressure is palpable: desks are strewn with papers, shoulders are hunched forward as leavers jerseys hang from the backs of chairs. But as a big digital clock ticks over to 11.30am on Thursday, there are visible sighs of relief as students firmly close 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. Meguerditchian is 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 marks 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. Sign up: AU Breaking News email 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.” Students in both English advanced and standard answer 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 Parett 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, writer and social worker Deirdre Fidge and Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults. This year’s exams did not include an image prompt, to Meguerditchian’s disappointment. Student debriefs on social media also 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, which asked students to write about how their texts enriched their “understanding of the endurance of the human spirit”, when many had been hoping to answer on “anomalies, inconsistencies and paradoxes”. At Cumberland, Thursday is a first for more than one reason. The school is undergoing a multimillion-dollar refurbishment and an active construction site: the English exam is 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. Year 12 student Damien Yap says: “After English, I think HSC is not a thing.” After that, camping trips, schoolies and the future. Meguerditchian, Sharma and Yap have early university offers, which they say takes the pressure off – “a bit too much, though”, jokes Meguerditchian. Most of the 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”. “These are amazing students. They have fought their way right through to year 12.” Josh Wilson, the head of PDHPE at Cumberland, says saying goodbye can be hard for teachers, but the start of HSC also marks an exciting new chapter. “Especially when you see the kids who started year 7 and went through and struggled a little bit, and they’re still here in year 12, it’s a really good thing to see them going and getting their HSC done.” Wilson, a firm believer in “a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast”, says his advice for the night before and morning of is to do “a little bit of work, but not too much that it’s going to keep you up all night and stress you out more”. “It’s the consolidation of the content that we’ve taught them.” HSC results will be released on Thursday 18 December.