Year 12 students in New South Wales have taken to social media to say they are “thinking about backup courses” after sitting the “ridiculously hard” HSC maths exam on Monday.
On Monday, around 60,000 students across the state sat the mathematics advanced, standard one, standard two, and extension two papers.
After they got out, students vented on TikTok about difficult questions and lamented over their futures.
“I lost so much sanity that when I arrived home, I started polishing cutlery,” one wrote on TikTok.
Another said they “started counting my marks and thinking of backup uni course options during that test”, while another student called for “jail for whoever made the maths advanced exam”.
The advanced exam appeared to get the biggest blowback over social media, with one TikTok user saying it was “ridiculously hard”.
“NESA what were you on when you wrote that?” the student said.
Jason Woo, a tutor, said there were a few questions on the test that students might “not have been comfortable with” as they were only studied for a week or two across the whole year.
“That could have thrown some off,” Woo said. “But the actual level of difficulty of the questions I think is very comparable to previous years.”
“I think 2020 was the hardest paper, that was the first paper of the new syllabus. Then I think the others … have all been relatively similar, and they’re a bit easier.”
So how would you have fared?
HSC standard math test
The standard math test started with multiple choice, with the first 10 questions worth one mark each.
Question 1 (one mark):
What is 4.26819 when rounded to 3 decimal places?
A. 4.26
B. 4.27
C. 4.268
D. 4.269
Question 10 (one mark):
A tap is dripping at the rate of 4mL per minute. Which expression shows how many litres this would amount to in one year?
A. (4 × 1000)/(60 × 24 × 365)
B. (4 × 60 × 24 × 365)/1000
C. (60 × 24 × 365)/(4 × 1000)
D. 1000/(4 × 60 × 24 × 365)
Question 15 (three marks):
Students were asked to look at flight distances (rounded to the nearest 10km) between various Australian cities. They were then asked to use the information in the table to complete the network diagram and work out a traveller’s journey in km from Hobart to Darwin.
Question 31 (five marks):
Students were asked to look at a scale drawing of a garden plan. They were then asked: Woodchips will be laid as a mulch on the garden beds to a depth of 10cm. What is the volume of woodchips required?
HSC advanced math
In the advanced exam, Woo said there was a notable lack of integral calculus, which in previous years has made up the bulk of the paper. Instead, there was more sequence and series arithmetic. But questions 11 and 21 were “a bit out of the ordinary for a HSC exam”, he said.
Question 11 (two marks):
The first three terms of an arithmetic sequence are 3, 7 and 11. Find the 15th term.
Woo’s younger sister, Jaimie, completed the test on Monday and said it was “a fair paper” that had a good amount of questions that made you think outside the box.
She said she was surprised by question 18, which was in both the advanced and standard tests.
“There was a question on a topic called bivariate data, which I think I had a lot of reading, which was quite overwhelming to most people,” she said.
“The majority of students at my school thought the exam was fair, but the reaction has been mixed.”
Question 18 (6 marks):
A university uses gas to heat its buildings. Over a period of 10 weekdays during winter, the gas used each day was measured in megawatts (MW) and the average outside temperature each day was recorded in degrees Celsius (°C). Using x as the average daily outside temperature and y as the total daily gas usage, the equation of the least-squares regression line was found. The equation of the regression line predicts that when the temperature is 0°C, the daily gas usage is 236MW. The ten temperatures measured were: 0°, 0°, 0°, 2°, 5°, 7°, 8°, 9°, 9°, 10°. The total gas usage for the ten weekdays was 1840MW.
In any bivariate dataset, the least-squares regression line passes through the point ( x¯, y¯), where x¯ is the sample mean of the x-values and y¯ is the sample mean of the y-values.
(a) Using the information provided, plot the point ( x¯, y¯) and the y-intercept of the least-squares regression line on the grid.
(b) What is the equation of the regression line?
(c) In the context of the dataset, identify ONE problem with using the regression line to predict gas usage when the average outside temperature is 23°C.
