HSC Legal Studies 2024: Test your knowledge against real multiple choice exam questions

Fort Street High School is the alma mater of dozens of NSW’s most high-profile judges and silks, but even the Class of 2024 found some of this year’s HSC legal studies questions tricky. Here are the answers.

Thursday’s HSC Legal Studies paper was ‘the bomb dotcom’, students say.

Year 12 legal studies students have cheered on the writers of their 2024 HSC exam for delivering a paper deemed “accessible” but “challenging”, in stark contrast to the controversial final exam of 2023.

In Part B of Section II students are required to write an essay on crime common to every cohort, with Question 24 this time asking: “To what extent does the criminal trial and sentencing process provide justice for adult offenders?”

While last year the same section was described by some as “diabolical”, on Thursday general consensus among test-takers was that Question 24 was a relief to read.

“Should’ve been a crime how devious the way a smirk appeared on my face after reading the crime question,” one student wrote on social media.

“Couldn’t be happier. That legal exam was the bomb dotcom” another wrote.

Fort Street High School legal studies teacher Bambul Shakibaei said the paper could be described as “accessible and challenging”, designed for critical thinking rather than “gotcha” questions to catch students out.

“We don’t just want them to memorise the dictionary, we want them to apply their understanding and show those higher order thinking skills,” he said.

Fort Street High School legal studies students Sofie Andersen (17), Marcus Aspinall (18) and Auryn Griffiths (18) after their HSC exam.

Across Section II short response questions, separate concepts from the syllabus were combined for each question.

In Question 22, which asked “In relation to human rights, discuss the extent to which the Australian Constitution reflects changing values and ethical standards”, Mr Shakibaei said students would likely want to reference the recent Voice to Parliament referendum and the fact the Constitution hasn’t been successfully amended since the 1970s.

“It requires them to understand that the Constitution is not meant to be a document that is easy to change,” he said.

“It’s a really good question to draw out their understanding … rather than just asking about one of those two (concepts) in isolation.”

Voting in the referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Picture: Getty Images

The trick to getting a full 15 marks in the crime section, Mr Shakibaei said, was for students to have included both the trial and sentencing process in their responses.

“This (question) enables them to draw on a wide range of things that they’ve learned in the crime topic, which is 30 per cent of the course.”

His students Sofie Andersen, Marcus Aspinall and Auryn Griffiths agreed the question was much more broad that in previous years.

“Whatever you had prepared you could kind of adapt it to the question,” Marcus said.

The opposite was true, however, of Section III, in which students had to write two essays from focus areas including consumer law, global environmental protection and workplace law.

Each area offered two essay question options with students able to pick either A or B for 25 marks.

Students at Fort Street High School — the alma mater of dozens of judges, silks and high-profile public servants — covered the “Family” and “World Order” topics in class, for which both ‘A’ questions addressed the role of governments in the 2024 paper.

It was a niche Sofie said could be “quite hard to answer”.

“I think often the HSC examiners try to catch people out who pre-prepared essays and memorised them by trying to make questions unique and specific,” Auryn said.

“Our options … would’ve troubled a lot of people who had pre-prepared responses.”

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