HSC standard, advanced maths 2024: YouTube-famous teacher Eddie Woo solves Question 31
Year 12 maths students have scratched their heads through a series of HSC exam papers so tricky that one question alone took Australia’s most famous maths teacher three attempts to solve.
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Year 12 mathematics students have stumbled and calculated their way through a series of HSC exam papers so tricky that one question alone took Australia’s most famous maths teacher three attempts to solve.
The 2024 Standard 2 and Advanced exams contained eight questions common to both papers, with many of the state’s standard stream students swearing the paper was significantly more challenging than the HSC exams of previous years.
Cherrybrook Technology High School students Melai Bloch, Chase Koorey, Aidan Fathinia and Sofia Culas agreed the paper was “pretty smooth sailing” – “until the last two pages”, Chase added – but admitted they found they found the exam tougher than their practice papers.
“I was expecting it to be easier,” Melai said.
“You’re not just simply applying formula – you had to really think about it,” Sofia added.
All four used the final half hour of the exam to go over their answers. Sofia said there were at least “two or three I didn’t know how to answer”.
The penultimate and final questions proved toughest, with the last four-mark Question 41 – a financial maths problem on compound interest – also appearing in the advanced paper as Question 26 and inspiring vigorous debate between both the students and teachers as to how best to solve it.
Co-head of the maths faculty Jo Iacona said the standard exam required “conceptual knowledge as well as procedural knowledge”, removing in some places the “scaffolding” some students would usually expect.
“It’s about your understanding, and not just memorising the things you’ve learned in the past.”
Jokes and memes about the most difficult questions – from theoretical flights from Sydney to Rio de Janeiro to conical cakes and snake measurements – went viral on social media, with students complaining about having the Nicki Minaj hit ‘Anaconda’ stuck in their heads while answering Question 30.
Advanced maths students Chevonne Kim, Isaac Cheang and Rachel Quah also found themselves challenged by mathematical problems that were far from formulaic.
“You just needed to think outside of the box,” Rachel said.
“I feel like they get a lot more creative (with questions) in the HSC papers, because I know when I was preparing, I did a lot of … trial papers. Compared to the trial papers, the questions in the HSC are a lot more different,” Chevonne added.
“HSC papers apply the knowledge more – you can’t just know the formulas and apply them, you have to think about it creatively,” Isaac explained.
Cherrybrook teacher and YouTube maths sensation Eddie Woo said the advanced maths HSC course is designed to equip students to solve question that “unfamiliar and non-routine”.
Even for Woo, who has been teaching the course for 16 years, the final question – which asked students to prove that when the perimeter of a shape was “minimised”, the internal angle of it “must be less than 2” – required three attempts.
WATCH HOW EDDIE WOO SOLVED ADVANCED QUESTION 31
To get the full three marks available, students would need to provide a “clear and persuasive, reasonable argument” – something often and incorrectly considered at odds with the “black and white” nature of mathematics.
“(For) a routine question, there’s a process to follow and you don’t even need to know why the process works, you can just follow it,” Mr Woo said.
“It’s like … when I jump in my car and I turn on the ignition, I really have no idea what’s happening but I don’t need to – the car’s designed so that I can make it go without knowing how it works.
“This question is a bit more like if there’s smoke coming out of the hood – if you lift it, and you say ‘I don’t know how this works’, you’re in trouble.”
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