HSC 2024 exams begin: What to expect and how to beat burnout
Casimir Catholic College triplets Sam, Dean and Jasmyne Marko will be among more than 70,000 Year 12 students whose HSC journey reaches the beginning of its end today.
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Casimir Catholic College triplets Sam, Dean and Jasmyne Marko will be among more than 70,000 Year 12 students whose HSC journey reaches the beginning of its end today as the four-week final exam period begins.
The trio will arrive back at school for one last ride, sitting down to the first English standard paper from 9:50am before coming back to do it all over again tomorrow with paper two.
“Recently, I think we’ve all been a bit stressed, (and we’re) definitely excited for it to be over,” Jasmyne said.
“We’ve got some plans to go on holiday after so that will be fun, but for now … but we’re trying our hardest to study.”
English remains the state’s only mandatory subject, after plans to make mathematics mandatory for all Year 12 students by 2026 were scrapped earlier this year.
The standard course is the most popular with 33,374 students enrolled, followed by the advanced course with 25,476 students. A further 10,069 have taken English Studies, a simplified alternative course with an optional exam, while 1,261 students were enrolled the year in the English as an additional language/dialect stream.
Dr Selina Samuels, a former HSC English marker and education expert at Cluey Learning, said paper one follows a “familiar pattern” every year, and in the first section – which asks test-takers to respond to a series of unseen texts – students can be “pretty confident” they’ll be given a poem, a prose extract, and likely a visual stimulus too.
“It’s important that you’re not just making observations about what happens in the text, but that you are making observations about the choices that they writers have made,” she advised students.
“Why did they choose that particular kind of language? Even if you feel that you don’t really understand the technical language, always think about the audience – who is this intended for? What is it intending to do?”
Markers are looking to award marks to each short answer or essay, rather than deducting them for mistakes, Dr Samuels said. Slightly misquoting a text or making a few spelling mistakes is not game over.
For weeks students across the state have been bunkering down at their desks or coming together in public libraries to prepare for these exams, and with four weeks of exams remaining many will be at risk of burning out.
Market research by KitKat has found as many as two in three students surveyed spend five hours at a time with their heads in the books. Time management expert Kate Christie said studying for such long periods without a “wakeful rest” is likely to do more harm than good.
“Research tells us that regular breaks are great for productivity – having a break allows your brain to compress and consolidate the information it has just reviewed, so it is time well spent,” she said.
“By allocating 25 minutes of focused study for each topic followed by a 5-minute mini-break, students can ensure they are covering off essential study areas while avoiding study fatigue.”
Despite their common DNA the Marko triplets have three very different study preferences, with Dean kept to his dual-monitor bedroom set up, while Jasmyne puts on headphones to study at the dining room table and Sam heads out to nearby Marrickville Library.
“We have a construction site next to our house, so it’s a bit noisy at times, so I like to just escape there and be in my own world, studying and doing past papers and whatnot,” Sam said.
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