‘Never seen a question like that’: Students react to HSC English exam

21 hours ago 6

Cronulla High School student Mason Boudville, 18, has looked at plenty of HSC English Advanced past papers and says most exam questions are typically entirely predictable.

“They seem to ask the same question, in a different font, every year,” he said.

Sienna Morrison, Cadel Wilkinson, head of English Tahlia Mihell, Ella Hewitt and Mason Boudville.

But when Mason, along with 60,000 other students, opened the English Paper 2 exam on Friday morning, he discovered examiners had managed to surprise him with a question about whether Jane Austen’s Emma had a good ending.

“It wasn’t something I was necessarily prepared for, purely because I have never seen a question like that.”

Students were asked: “In what ways are these closing paragraphs an effective resolution to the narrative tensions explored in Austen’s Emma?”

Sienna Morrison, 18, also realised it posed a challenge. “It wasn’t a good resolution,” she said.

Disagreeing with the premise of the question, her essay argued the utopian, but patriarchal, village of Highbury in the novel was characterised by snobbery and monotony of the gentry.

“Emma says she comes to a resolution of never quitting her dad, which means she is always going to stay in that same utopic setting which is going to stagnate her growth as a person,” Sienna said.

She had better luck with the final section, where students were asked to compose a piece of writing in response to a picture of a clock with students standing in front of it.

“My piece was about a girl who is stuck in limbo of constantly worrying and wondering when a guy is going to see her, when he’s going to come back,” Sienna said.

“I had a reoccurring motif of a clock, it was like ‘tick tock’. I show through the clock motif how she comes more mentally unstable, and how she loses her sense of self through the man she wants.”

For English Standard student Ella Hewitt, 18, the final section of her exam gave her the option of writing either an imaginary or creative piece of writing, in response to two sentences: “A fond memory brings you a wave of comfort and ignites the senses. It’s the kind of memory you can visualise and describe in rich detail.”

Ella crafted a piece of writing about two strangers over time “and how we can have quite a significant impact on each other without even knowing”.

Cronulla High School student Ella Hewitt enjoyed the section on memory.

St Clare’s College Waverley’s leader of learning English, Mary Prince, said she loved the question.

“Memory is at the core of what shapes our humanity. With ‘fond’ memories in particular there was a lot of scope for students to explore warm, sentimental moments, and to experiment with the intersection between storytelling and reality, past and present.”

She said the question on the endings of individual texts students had studied at their schools – which, along with Emma, also included the poems of T. S. Eliot and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations – was “really clever” and rewarded those who were well-prepared and understood their whole text.

Cronulla High’s head of English, Tahlia Mihell, said, overall, the exam was accessible for students but agreed the question about resolutions was challenging and would differentiate students.

“Every year it can be really stressful going in … [This year students] were saying there’s all these conspiracy TikToks and all sorts of thing that are out about, saying: Will the question be this? Will the question be that? It is an interesting world to be completing the HSC.”

The 2025 HSC exams will run until Friday, November 7.

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