Are you smarter than an HSC student? Take our quiz to see how you square up to the Class of 2023
HSC exams are drawing to a close but a tense wait remains for the results. Students can see how expert tutors solved the toughest question and others can take our quiz to see how they stack up.
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The Class of 2023 are almost ready to down their textbooks and burn their study notes with the HSC exam period drawing to a close.
As students reflect on papers which were largely uncontroversial and await their results, here’s a sneak peek at what their answers should’ve looked like for some of the toughest exams, plus a challenge for readers – could you have done any better?
Are you smarter than a HSC student? Take the quiz
Year 12 students must take 10 units of study to achieve their HSC, meaning they must learn at least five subjects, but there is no upper limit and students often take a ‘spare’ subject and/or extension courses.
Memorising content for seven or eight subjects is no mean feat. The quiz below covers multiple-choice questions from the 2023 exams for biology, advanced mathematics, extension mathematics, legal studies and business studies. How many can you answer correctly?
In the HSC, the five mathematics exams tend to spark the greatest outrage among students. NESA sets high expectations for the students that sit those exams, in particular the two extension courses.
The 2023 HSC exams for Standard 2 and Advanced Maths featured ‘wordy’ questions which tested students’ conceptual understanding of the topics they’ve studied, with several common questions across both papers.
Head of Maths at Matrix Education Oak Ukritnukun said Question 34 in the Standard exam, listed as Question 18 in the Advanced paper, was very similar to a question in the 2020 HSC paper, however students found the graphing task involving regression lines tricky.
See how an expert tutor solves the common question in the video below
Mr Oak also said he had heard a lot of two-unit students complain about Question 17 in the advanced exam, which tasked students with finding an integral, and could be solved with substitution by extension students, or the reverse chain rule.
Question 27 was also a doozy, testing students on their understanding of the “curve transformation”, as well as the “absolute value and the inequality”, Mr Ukritnukun said.
“I find this question really interesting, it’s a combination of multiple concepts.”
See how an expert tutor solves Question 17 and 27 questions in the video below
Another question Advanced students found unfamiliar was Question 30, a two-part test of their ability to find the ‘stationary points’ of a function and draw the graph it forms.
Cherrybrook High School maths teacher and YouTube sensation Eddie Woo said the calculus question was “a bit curly” for some.
See how Eddie Woo solves Question 30 in the video below
The Extension 2 exam is famously the toughest test of them all, and only a few thousand students in the entire state take the course.
Designed to differentiate between accomplished students and truly gifted mathematicians, the final question can take more than half an hour to complete.
Matrix maths teacher Asm Ifti has shown how to answer the final part of the final question, 16c, in the video below.
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