Experts, 14 yo boy weigh in on this year’s HSC mathematics exam

Some students spent 30 minutes on a question on goannas while other pupils said the maths was easy but the challenge was to read large blocks of text to figure out the questions.

Wordy questions including one about a goanna left some HSC mathematics students stumped while scores of ­students struggled to finish their exams which were dubbed tough but fair by experts ­yesterday.

In the Standard mathematics paper, a question about a goanna sent some students venting on social media once the exam was over.

“Guys what was that goanna & emu question I spent 30 minutes on it and still couldn’t answer it someone please explain it to me,” one student wrote. Among the 53,402 students to sit the Advanced and Standard exams across the state was 14-year-old Jason Nguyen who said, despite his passion for all things mathematics, the Advanced paper was tricky.

“I think it was fine, the last two questions were quite difficult,” the Westfields Sports High student said.

14-year-old Jason Nguyen with year 12 student, Ethan Jamieson, 18, at Westfields Sports High School. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

While scores of students reported struggling to get through the three hour test, Jason said he managed to finish although he was unsure how he went on the tricky two final questions.

“Usually in tests I do poorly in time management, but I did manage to finish in time,” he said. He was part of a group of Year 9 students who were accelerated to the HSC and he opted to do the exams despite missing out on months of school this year due to Covid. The youngest person sitting exams in NSW this year is 13, while the oldest is 69.

Principal Andrew Rogers said despite Westfields being a sports high school, they also have aimed to maintain a strong maths culture.

School captain Ethan Jamieson, 18, who plays first grade cricket for the University of NSW, said spending many hours at the crease batting had given him the psychological edge in the three hour exam.

“If I have a good day in a cricket game, I am batting for between four and six hours so that level of concentration, maintaining a similar level of focus for long periods of time, certainly helps in these long HSC exams,” he said.

He said the final two questions, including one asking for a “discrete random variable’s probability distribution” and another asking to calculate the probability of someone’s IQ, stumped him initially.

Head of Maths at leading tutoring company Matrix Education Oak Ukritnukun said both the Advanced and Standard paper were fair to students who had studied.

“The Maths Advanced exam placed more emphasis on statistics which is not unexpected since this is an entirely new module to the 2019 syllabus,” he said.

Sydney Technical High School student Ryan Suhardjo said that the change to more statistics meant the Advanced paper required a lot of reading, especially for a test which was supposed to primarily be testing students’ knowledge of mathematical concepts.

“It really was wordy … the mathematics involved wasn’t difficult but it required a lot of interpretation – they gave a lot of words and lots of text that you had to read,” he said.