HSC maths 2023: YouTube star Eddie Woo reveals answer to Advanced exam’s Question 30
Eddie Woo, Cherrybrook Technology High School maths teacher and internet sensation, reveals the answers to the 2023 Advanced Maths exam’s hardest question, and how to find it.
Education
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YouTube-famous maths teacher Eddie Woo and his colleagues at Cherrybrook Technology High School have expressed their relief that the subject won’t be compulsory for the HSC until 2026.
With a revamped Year 7 to 10 curriculum starting next year, while making maths mandatory was a “good statement” Mr Woo said teachers needed more time to bring students along for the ride with a new style of learning.
The new early years maths curriculum has a heavy focus on “conceptual understanding”, a skill increasingly being reflected in HSC exams.
Cherrybrook’s co-head teachers of maths Jo Iacona and Jen Bowen said it’s a level of learning much more closely aligned to real-world jobs and tertiary study.
“There’s definitely … a push for (students) to be able to not just do rote learning and number crunching, it’s more about making sure that they can interpret information,” Ms Bowen said.
“You’re preparing them for things like psychology … and other professions where they might need to use data … it’s really about practical preparation.”
Mr Woo said advancements like artificial intelligence make it more important than ever for students to learn problem solving skills.
“Maths … has always been inextricably linked to the march of technology,” he said.
“We’re at the very, very beginning of a really exciting stage.”
The previous government originally intended for 2024 to be the first year of mandatory HSC maths, but delays to the release of a senior school syllabus will see every student sit a maths exam for the first time in 2026 instead.
Those delays have given teachers and school leaders a “little bit of leeway” to master the new curriculum themselves, and address any staffing issues, Ms Iacona said.
“If you’re going to make everybody do maths, then you need more maths teachers and there’s a shortage,” Ms Bowen added.
“At this school it wouldn’t be a massive issue, because we basically have one class that don’t do maths … but you go to Western Sydney and you might have five classes that choose not to.”
The 2023 HSC exams for Standard and Advanced Maths featured multiple ‘wordy’ questions which forced students to prove their conceptual understanding, stumping some.
Standard 2 student Leah-Cherie Holt said the paper was overall “a little bit easier than some of the past papers” but Question 34, a graphing question, took her and classmate Harry around 15 minutes to complete.
“The questions that had a lot of words, (where) you had to decipher the problem from the words instead of it just giving you a formula, (were) a lot harder,” she said.
In the Advanced paper, fellow Cherrybrook Tech students Umica Ratnam and James Doak found themselves spending a lot of time on a two-part calculus question. Question 30 asked students to find the ‘stationary points’ of a function and draw the graph it forms.
“I spent a good 15 to 20 minutes on that one,” James said.
“I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it in any of the past papers,” Umica added.
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