HSC Software Engineering 2025: First ever online exam quizzes students on artificial intelligence
The first ever online exam for Software Engineering has gone off without a hitch, with hundreds of HSC students logging in to locked-down browsers to run Python programs and “pseudocode”.
The first ever online exam for Software Engineering has gone off largely without a hitch, with hundreds of HSC students logging in to locked-down browsers to script Python programs and “pseudocode”.
Just under 1800 students across NSW sat the exam for the new subject, which replaced the ageing Software Design and Development syllabus last year.
With a new syllabus came a new exam format, turning the written final paper into an interactive online test that allowed students to input and run code.
The Ponds High School in Sydney’s west has one of the largest HSC cohorts in the state and 24 students sitting the Software Engineering exam this year.
TAS (Technological and Applied Studies) head teacher Mariah Bell said the school’s bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy meant students needed to have the special browser installed on their laptops before graduating last term.
The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) deployed the browser along with a test quiz to ensure exam-takers were familiar with the format.
“In terms of getting them prepped and ready for online exams, it was a lot of back-end work in (learning management system) Canvas,” Ms Bell said.
“I worked our Technology Support Officer to embed Python IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) inside a Canvas quiz … to give them exposure to similar tools.
“We don’t have access to the tools that NESA set for the exam.”
Her students Sevan Hettiarachchy, Shalia Narayan, Ibrahim Jamal and Xavier Martinez said there were no technical problems with the exam, although there were some surprises among the questions themselves.
“I was expecting it to be a lot worse than what was there, it was pretty easy for me, I’d say,” Xavier said.
“We did some test runs in class where the teacher gave us a sample exam and we’d do it online to see if there was any difficulties, and it all went pretty well.”
The final question on human bias in artificial intelligence was trickier than the rest of the test for Sevan, who was “surprised by the video stimulus they gave us”.
“I didn’t expect that at all,” he said.
Ibrahim, 17, is considering further study in software engineering post-school, and said the exam required more than black-and-white thinking.
“This exam was a lot more scenario based, rather than referring to the content straight off,” he said.
“It wasn’t a test where you could just know your definitions and do it … you had to know the concepts.
I prefer it to be more like scenario-based, because … it’s a better way of assessing a student’s knowledge.”
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Originally published as HSC Software Engineering 2025: First ever online exam quizzes students on artificial intelligence
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