Advanced English students had to abandon creative writing plans during their HSC exam on Wednesday morning when the question often reserved for an imaginative answer asked for a discursive or persuasive response instead.
A record 76,000 pupils returned to school halls for English paper two on Wednesday, a day after sitting their first HSC exam.
South Sydney HSC students (from left) Ruby Fletcher, Drew Kelso, Spyder Shkolnik, Tergel Baasanjav, Bessie Kleiman, and Elliot Ross.Credit: Janie Barrett
Students at Maroubra’s South Sydney High School had prepared references from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language to deploy for an imaginative piece in the advanced paper, but were made to adapt after the exam question asked students to ponder the benefits of basic living without the convenience of time-saving technologies.
Spyder Shkolnik wrote 15 pages for their first two modules, which focused on the works of William Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot, leaving them with 10 minutes to complete the “craft of writing” section, for which students are recommended to budget 40 minutes. Shkolnik’s pinky finger started to bleed in the dying minutes of the exam, after suffering a paper cut while flicking through their paper.
“I got two pages in [the last question], so I’ll still get some marks,” Shkolnik said. “I went real pretentious – the flaws of human arrogance.”
A question focused on the critical study of literature raised greater problems for Shkolnik’s classmate Ruby Fletcher, who was asked to make a judgment on how the literary value of T.S. Eliot’s work was influenced by the poet’s artistry and integrity.
“It was the hardest question to answer because it was less surrounding an exact analysis of the quotes, and you had to use your quotes to back up interpreting an artistry, which is something you don’t cover throughout the course as much as analysing the poetry,” Fletcher said.
Jonathan Kassab, who taught English to Fletcher, Shkolnik and Bessie Kleiman, agreed with Fletcher’s diagnosis.
“Juggling some of the language of the second question would be the one that separates some of the students,” Kassab said. “It’s asking students for quite a lot, whereas the other ones are just a bit more straightforward.”
While Shkolnik, Fletcher and Kleiman wrestled with the advanced English paper, schoolmates Drew Kelso, Elliot Ross and Tergel Baasanjav completed the standard English exam.
Standard students were asked to craft an imaginative response to an illustration depicting a girl watering plants while another person steals apples in the background.
Baasanjav liked the question, finding the image “quite generous” and allowing a broad range of interpretation, while Kelso deployed the motif of light, and its role in supporting growth and creating shadow, in his response.
Kelso, Ross and Baasanjav all found an essay question probing the role of literature in changing global perceptions challenging.
Baasanjav and Ross discussed the distinctive qualities from Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, including critiques of commercialism and exploitation, to highlight growing trends of consumerism across the world, while Kelso took a different approach.
“I chose to write about Truman’s change of character, and how he grew to understand the world around him, and developed his own autonomy and freedom,” Kelso said.
Row erupts over potential AI use in English exam stimuli
The continuing of HSC exams comes one day after students detected what they thought was an AI-generated image used as stimuli for a written response in the first English exam, which was undertaken on Tuesday.
The image shows a pristine river on a laptop, which sits on a wooden bench next to two smartphones and a coffee mug, and overlooking a similarly pristine river.
The stimuli used in Tuesday’s HSC exam that some believe is AI generated.Credit: Florian Schroeder/Medium
Students who were asked to use the image as part of a response to human experiences have pointed to irregularities in the illustration of the coffee mug handle and wires to suggest it may be AI generated.
The illustration was published on blogging site Medium in July last year, and published by Florian Schroeder, who describes himself as “passionate about AI” on his X profile. This masthead has contacted Schroeder for comment. NESA declined to confirm if the image was AI generated.
The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) has contacted the publisher of the image since the exam to seek approval for the stimuli to be published on its website for future students to analyse, which is customary for all stimuli used in HSC exams, but is yet to hear back.
HSC students across the state will sit exams in 124 subjects over the next four weeks, with the final written exams to take place on November 8.
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