HSC students were asked a “strange question” about smell in their English exam, as the biggest cohort of 76,000 pupils sat their first test on Tuesday morning.
At Sydney Girls High School, Rozana Abonty, 18, said she was forced to stop and think about what it meant for humans to experience smell when she read the first question of the exam.
Sydney Girls HSC students Ally Xie, Sofia Malik, Rozana Abonty and Stephanie La after the completion of the HSC English advanced paper 1 exam. Credit: Louise Kennerley
“It was a bit of a strange question … I was confused about how I would phrase my answer,” she said.
She eventually settled on writing about how smell intersected with other senses, emotions and memory.
Her classmate Ally Xie, 18, said this year’s English paper was different in that the hardest question (worth five marks) in the first short-answer section came at the middle of the exam – not at the end. That asked students to consider a piece of writing about a farm and compare it to a photo of an old MacBook placed on a table next to a river.
“All my friends were like: ‘That’s artificial intelligence’,” Ally said.
The HSC will feature 124 exams over the next 19 days.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Stephanie La, 17, said the essay question for English advanced students was unlike any posed in recent years.
“I think the essay question was particularly challenging due to its complexity,” she said.
She wrote about Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible and said because of the multipronged nature of the essay question, the length of her essay blew out. “I broke it into qualities, and then motivations and actions,” she said.
Rozana did not quite finish every section of the paper. She said she struggled to keep her hand from tensing up as she wrote during the short answer question.
“My frustration was: ‘Why can’t I write well? Why doesn’t it look good?’ I felt I had to slow down.”
Sofia Malik, 18, said she had mainly taken school notes on a computer during class time. After finishing the first English exam, she questioned whether she should have used her laptop so much.
“I prefer to take notes online, but I agree, we should have done more written practice.”
English Teachers Association of NSW chief executive Imelda Judge said overall the exam was fair and everything asked was in the syllabus.
She said the essay question, as was the case in recent years, had attempted to discern students who reproduced a prepared essay they had memorised, but was otherwise straightforward.
“It might have been challenging for some who came with prepared answers,” she said.
“I think one of the things which has been attempted to be achieved in the exam process in recent years is the ability to discriminate between students who come with prepared responses compared to those who can actually respond to the question on the day.”
A total of 124 exams will take place over the next 19 days. The second English exam will take place on Wednesday morning.
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