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After 37 years of marking HSC English, there is one mistake Lindy Jones sees over and over: students not answering the question on the paper, often because they have come into the exam with a pre-prepared response.
“[Students] don’t always pivot to respond to the nuances of the question,” she says. “They need to know their text well enough to be able to be flexible in their answers.”
Castle Hill High School’s head of English, Lindy Jones, has been marking HSC exams for 37 years. Credit: Wolter Peeters
Jones is one of 6500 markers who assess the performance of nearly 80,000 HSC students across NSW each year.
The Castle Hill High School English head is also one of the longest standing HSC markers: one of just 30 to have marked students across four decades.
“If you’ve been marking as long as I have, I guess there’s a danger that some things could start to sound stale,” Jones says.
But there is always work that surprises her. Those she will never forget are the ones with feeling – from post-apocalyptic interpretations of Sydney life, to satirical criticism of US politics – and where students discover something in themselves.
“Students still have their own unique voices. It’s just beautiful to read,” she says.
Marking the HSC for so long has delivered its own lessons for Jones. High among them is to not underestimate the capacity of young people to surprise.
She has seen how a student with the messiest handwriting can have the best ideas, a quiet student can have the most inquiring mind, and a self-conscious student can produce a breathtaking personal project.
“I think it’s very easy to dismiss teenagers as being pretty shallow and naive and overly immersed in social media. But actually, they are very invested in the world,” Jones says.
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“They are inspired and spurred on by the causes they care about, and reflect their feelings through their work. With the digital age delivering greater access to information, students have developed more nuanced perspectives of the world.”
Jones marked her first HSC paper in 1988, four years into her 41-year teaching career.
She has been a marker and a supervisor for other English papers, but she now judges English Extension 2 major works: the long-form pieces written by the state’s top students.
With major works typed and scanned, Jones works from home.
It is a far cry from when she started in the late 1980s, at the old showgrounds at Moore Park, where thousands of markers would gather to assess handwritten responses together, some building canopies above their desks to deflect bird poo falling from the ceiling.
The class of 2025 will receive their HSC results on December 18. Jones knows well that not all students will be happy: she pursued English teaching only after she missed out on her first-preference course: medicine.
“If you know you are doing your best, whatever that level is, you have to be happy with the outcome,” she says.
Thirty-seven years and thousands of student papers later, she’s happy with that outcome.
“I’ve never regretted it. Never.”
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