A Nazi cartoon featured in this year’s HSC exam. Some private school students had seen it before

As thousands of year 12 students flipped through their HSC modern history paper at the start of their exam on Wednesday afternoon, some in private schools spied something eerily familiar.

It was a historical cartoon of Hitler Youth children, with one waving a Swastika flag, from a 1930s children’s activity book.

A historical source used in the HSC Modern History exam from Nazi Germany.Credit: NSW Education Standards Authority

The image in the HSC exam was identical to one used by the NSW Independent Trial Exams paper, purchased and used by numerous schools across Sydney and NSW. Schools in any sector can purchase Independent Trial Exams, including public and Catholic ones.

Milo McNee, 17, from Barker College said he immediately saw small details previously identified by his teacher when they reviewed their answers to the trial paper, which hinted at its original purpose.

“The most important part, and no one can really see this, but there’s like, a dotted line, and it’s actually a cardboard cutout, and it’s supposed to be toys that the kids can play with,” he said.

History textbook author Ken Webb, who until a few years ago was on the examination committee for the Independent Schools Trial modern history exam, said using the identical cartoon did not give private school students an unfair advantage.

“Even if you’ve come across it before, the question is asking something quite different,” he said.

Wednesday’s question asked students about the value of the cartoon to a historian studying the methods used by Nazis to spread their ideology. The trial question asked them to use elements of the cartoon to explain what role youth organisations played in the Nazi state.

Webb said that if students had prepared well and studied, they would be able to answer the question confidently regardless of whether they had seen it before. He also said HSC exams tended to be set earlier in the year, while the trial ones for independent schools were finalised later.

Noah Laszok, Leah Wang, Ben Weatherall and Milo McNee after their exam on Wednesday.Credit: James Brickwood

“There is no skulduggery ... It is unlikely and pure coincidence that a picture could be used in a practice exam and it could appear in the HSC,” he said.

Trial exams have sparked fairness concerns in the past – in 2020, the HSC English Standard exam was remarkably similar to a Catholic schools’ trial paper and in 2004 the ancient history paper was mired by claims it was almost identical.

This year, 10,873 students across the state sat the modern history exam.

For Milo, most of the three-hour exam was spent writing essays but for the past two years, he fell in love with the subject because of the chance to learn about what it was like living under dictators such as Hitler and lesser-known parts of World War II.

“It’s always been my favourite subject. It’s so much more interesting,” he said.

“They tell you a story. And that’s why I could get behind it – because I was learning new things.”

Noah Laszok, 17, said the anomaly he noted in the paper was a series of essay questions on topics such as conflict in Europe which began with the word “why”. That was different to the usual pattern in HSC exams where students are asked to evaluate particular claims relating to historical events.

“This one, it was just more like ‘give me your opinion on it, and you’ll have to make your own judgment parameters yourself and figure out how you’re arguing this’, rather than them being like, ‘evaluate this event and argue from that perspective’.”

Leah Wang, 18, said she was not tripped up by the why question.

“The question I chose to do was, why did the Russian campaign fail? Which is just all the reasons why. That to me is, pretty straightforward,” she said.

Ben Weatherall, 17, said the exam was fair but a 15-mark question on the impact of Hitler’s dictatorship meant he had to write a mini-essay in the first section – which was unusual for the modern history exam.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Education Standards Authority, the organisation which runs HSC exams, said there were only a finite number of sources for particular topics.

“It is not unusual that a source or stimulus, like the one used in the Modern History exam, is also used in a commercial trial exam,” she said.

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