New South Wales year 12 students sat their first HSC exam on Wednesday – and for some it was “a nightmare”.
Students kicked off two-and-a-half weeks of exams with part one of their English papers, including a long-format essay and five short-answer questions.
After the exam, students took to social media to unpack what they had just been through.
“OK rant with me about English paper 1 because what the hell was that,” one student posted on social media. “That was just like, a nightmare, it really was.”
The 2023 English papers did not use an image as a writing prompt this year, instead including feature and opinion pieces, poems and prose. Students received samples from five texts and were asked a series of short-answer questions testing their analysis of the content.
“Where was the image?” the student continued. “No, like I was rooting on the image getting me through. I was like ‘if in doubt the image will ace me out’.”
“I was ready to eat the image up and it wasn’t there,” another said. A third said: “we were robbed.”
“I think I wrote communism instead of consumerism,” one student commented on social media, with a sad-face emoji.
So how do you think you would have gone?
Part one: ‘Very misleading’
Children’s author Roald Dahl is a household name for literature lovers, but it was his granddaughter Sophie Dahl whose feature article The Idea of Welcome was included in this year’s exam.
For five marks, students were prompted:
How does Dahl use personal experience to show the reader the importance of kindness?
But the inclusion of Sophie and not her grandfather was an unnecessary layer of confusion for some.
“I was like Dahl … damn is my man Roald Dahl up in this thing?” one social media user posted.
“If it’s about Roald, bitch I can write, [but] no … Sophie Dahl. Who the fuck is Sophie Dahl? Not that that matters but still, it was very misleading.”
Part two: Living in the moment
A major source of anxiety was the inclusion of a poem.
“WHO DECIDED TO PUT THE APRICOT AND WHATEVER POEM IN ADV PAPER”, one social media user wrote.
Being Here, penned by the renowned New Zealand writer Vincent O’Sullivan, reads as follows:
It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees
arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies
of the laden apricot tree without wanting
symbols—–which of course are manifold*—–symbols
of so much else? What’s amiss with simply the huddle
and glut of bees, with those fuzzed globes
by the hundred and the clipped out sky
beyond them and the leaves that are black
if you angle the sun directly behind them,
being themselves, for themselves? I hold out
my palms like the opened pages of a book
and you pile apricots on them stacked three
deep, we ask just who can we give them to
round here who haven’t had their whack of apricots
as it is? And I let my hands tilt and the plastic
bag that you hold rustles and plumps with their
rush, I hold one back and bite into it and its
taste is the taste of the colour exactly, and this
hour precisely, and memory I expect is storing
for an afternoon far removed from here
when the warm furred almost weightlessness
of the fruit I hold might very well be a symbol
of what’s lost and we keep on wanting, which after
all is to crave the real, the branches cutting
across the sun, your standing there while I tell you,
‘Come on, you have to try one!’, and you do,
and the clamour of bees goes on above us, ‘This
will do’, both of us saying, ‘like this, being here!’
For five marks, students were asked to respond to the prompt:
Analyse how O’Sullivan captures the idea of being in the moment.
The poem provoked instant memes on social media, with one user jesting “when I see bees I live in the moment” and others simply posting pictures of apricots next to crying emojis.
“You’re telling me no one else linked the ‘bees’ to ‘just being’ also what was the apricot all about,” one social media user questioned.
O’Sullivan told Guardian Australia the poem had a simple message.
“I do hope for some of the students, the lines got across the poem’s simple certainty that ‘now’ is where so much that is built into our values take place – spontaneous, memorable, maybe quite everyday at the time,” he said.
“Memory after all is always in the present tense.”
He pointed to a line in the poem depicting the “warm furred almost weightlessness of fruit”, which alluded to “so simple a thing as being with someone who is important to us”.
“The clamour of bees goes on above us” went on to express that “what is so good once remains so good forever – that is what living, what being, implies”.
“The poem is specific about this one occasion, but it implies being open and celebrating something fine when it happens, endures as part of us,” the 86-year-old reflected.
“If only people didn’t often think poems are more ‘complicated’ than they are.”
Part three: Why so much Italy content?
The nation of Italy was another surprise hit in this year’s English paper, with the inclusion of the Australian comedian, radio and television presenter Kate Langbroek’s memoir, Ciao Bella!
The text details Langbroek’s move to Italy with her family, and the growing pains of adapting to a new life in Bologna.
In response, students took to TikTok to share I Love Italy memes set to the tune of That’s Amore.
“Why so much Italy content? Not complaining just asking,” one user questioned.
The exam included an extract of the book, detailing the “emotional response” conjured by Italy:
For four marks, students were asked:
Analyse Langbroek’s representation of the emotional impact of new places.
The HSC exams will wrap up on Friday, 3 November. Until then, students will be left dwelling on what could have been, what never was – and whether they suddenly feel like eating an apricot.
