Walking out of the school gates with a spring in her step on Friday afternoon, Rhiannon Trang realised she possessed something that had eluded her for the past two years: free time.

“It’s kind of scary,” the 17-year-old Mercy Catholic College student said after her final HSC exam, physics. “Before I had to have a routine, and now it’s like, wait … if I want to do something, I can do that.”

Across the state, almost 75,000 students are breathing easier after HSC exams ended on Friday, closing with physics, dance and food technology.

Over the past four weeks, nearly 75,000 students sat more than 400,000 exam sessions, in 123 subjects, running across 750 exam locations.

It’s not HSC without controversy. In English, students analysed a magazine article about ’90s superheroes, while maths teachers described the advanced exam as one of the hardest papers in recent times, and some believed the biology exam was a copy-and-paste job.

That faded into the distance on Friday when students put pens down. Now they wait for their results as 6500 markers assess responses from more than 1.2 million exam papers.

Rhiannon has vowed to get a job and tend to her hobbies – crocheting a blanket she has been eyeing off and tackling the books next to her bed.

“I can have fun, guilt-free,” Rhiannon said. “When I saw the paper, I was kind of scared, but at the same time I was like: ‘this is the last time I am going to be opening an exam paper’, so I was also relieved.”

Rhiannon had a week between her second-last exam and the physics paper, but she reached “the point where I had studied so much throughout the whole year that the final stretch was really hard”.

Asked what advice she would give her year 11 self, Rhiannon said: “I expected it to be a lot more overwhelming because you built up suspense throughout the year and in your head it is this big scary exam. But after all the preparation we’ve done, it was hard, but it wasn’t unachievable.”

To avoid stressing over her results, which will be released on December 18, she is “going to think about how excited I am to be done with everything”.

Classmate Rebecca Price said the reality of school being over “hasn’t hit her yet”, but she is excited to go home and lie in bed. “I can properly relax guilt-free.”

The 18-year-old said she “isn’t expecting huge things from her ATAR”, but she has obtained early entry to study law at Notre Dame.

Tamika Rodrigo,18, felt “a little upset” about her physics paper. “There were some questions that were really hard, and I couldn’t start anywhere,” she said.

Rodrigo hopes to study medicine and said it was “nice to know I don’t have to go home and do practice papers, I can just relax until February, when university starts”.

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