A WAVE of calm washed over St Paul's Catholic College students Jessica Robinson and Michael Pockran with their first HSC exam behind them.
Close to 70,000 HSC students put pen to paper on Wednesday as written exams began with English Paper 1.
But, instead of ragged fingernails and stressed sighs, the benefit of early entry into the University of Newcastle gave the Booragul students the certainty they needed to face their biggest test yet with confidence.
"I've got early entry so all I need to do is sit the exams," Michael said.
"I'm still stressed about it because they are big exams and I want to see what I can get, but the pressure at least has been taken off."
Both students are bright sparks, with Jessica looking forward to a double degree in media and communications and law, and Michael planning his career as a chemical engineer.
"It is changing," Michael said.
"Over the past year we've been told over and over again about how it's not as big as it's been made out to seem and there's always different pathways to get where you want to go, but before then it was absolutely the biggest thing in life."
Jessica said she'd been warned since about Year 6 that her HSC mark would play a determining factor in the direction of her life.
"I was like, I'm 12!," she said.
"I've loved school, I always have and I've had a very good school experience - I shockingly was very unemotional when we graduated, which was weird, I thought I would have been really upset.
"I don't think it's actually dawned on me that this is it, we're done. It's not going to hit me for a while after the HSC ends I don't think."
Thursday's English Paper 2 is expected to be the big one as students prepare to tackle three 1000-word essays in two hours.
Students have completed half of their course mark throughout the year, and the next 18 days will be an opportunity to demonstrate what they've learned in their 13 years of schooling.
When the exams wrap up on November 3, more than 68,000 Year 12 students will have sat for more than 400,000 unique exam sessions.
At Fletcher's Bishop Tyrrell Anglican College, school captain Hallie Boucher said she felt relieved the first exam was done and was ready to tackle the others.
"Most of my preparation has been going over my trials notes and exams as well as doing past papers," she said.
"I'm very excited for the future, so I'm hoping to have a gap year to travel and then go to the Australian National University for psychology."
Fellow school captain Jacob Wolfgang said he was stoked to put the first exam behind him.
"Even if it is the shortest out of them all," he said.
"I will have to try my hardest not to slow down over the rest of the HSC period, my preparation has really centred around reviewing the course content, and then testing myself with past HSC papers as practice."
The principal of Bishop Tyrrell Anglican College, Paul Humble, said that this year marked a welcome return to the normality of school life.
"Students greatly benefited from a full year of face-to-face teaching and learning as well as the social and emotional supports in place at school," he said.
"Our students have been able to focus on their studies and have reaped the benefits of this with over half the cohort receiving early entry to the courses of their choice at universities across NSW.
"It has been a very successful year for the class of 2023, and we are all incredibly proud of them."
More than 120 exams are scheduled across the next three and a half weeks, with papers written by more than 300 exam developers wrapping up with the Food Technology course exam.
