HSC Maths Exam Gets an F for Failing Our Students (2 Viewers)

[Trebla]

Interesting opinion piece from the head of Maths at SCEGGS, particularly ripping on the Ext1 HSC paper:

HSC maths exam gets an F for failing our students

After completing an exam, one of my students said: “I felt like I never got an opportunity to show them what I know!”

www.smh.com.au

Interested to know people’s thoughts…

 

[Run hard@thehsc]

idk i think it resonates with me.... papers for 4u and 3u was harder, but I thought the nature of 4u test being more difficult was justified.... 3u seemed quite a bit more difficult to what I was faced with from trial papers and past hsc papers. But that could also be cos my performance was not upto scratch on the day. So ig I somewhat align with the person?

 

[tywebb]

A few months before Coroneos died I rang him for what I thought was going to be a 2 minute conversation about a book. It quickly diverged to many other things and turned into a 5 hour conversation. One of the things discussed was the length of the 2 unit papers. Back in 1967 the entire paper was 2 pages. In 2004 (the year before Coroneos died) it was 12 pages. This year it was 40 pages!

He was complaining that this much bigger paper has moved significantly away from what it was originally intended for.

 

[ExtremelyBoredUser]

idk i think it resonates with me.... papers for 4u and 3u was harder, but I thought the nature of 4u test being more difficult was justified.... 3u seemed quite a bit more difficult to what I was faced with from trial papers and past hsc papers. But that could also be cos my performance was not upto scratch on the day. So ig I somewhat align with the person?

No problem with difficulty. 4u's fine, just took everyone off guard. Moreso problem with the distribution of problems (for 3u), some topics were undertested (lack of difficulty, very basic, generic) e.g volumes, calc whereas others were repeated too often throughout the exam e.g stats, vectors so it didn't feel nice in that regards but I can't complain now, at least scaling exists.

Also we got one more exam (phys) till our HSC finishes best luck bro its been a nice 2 year journey

 

[yanujw]

I think students anticipate the last question too highly - or you could say that nesa puts in too little effort to make something sophisticated. In 4u, most people expect the very last question to be from one of the hardest sections of the syllabus e.g. reduction formulae, de movire's theorem, inequality in calculus. But in the last 2 years nesa takes what would be considered medium parts of the complex numbers topics and turns them into short, unusual questions, which leaves students unsatisfied in difficulty or confused at the lack of proper testing of rigorous topics.

 

[MJRey]

I think he makes a fair point. Obviously you'd expect that questions 13 and 14 would be more difficult, although this year the majority of them were ridiculously hard for no reason.

 

[Nedom]

From my experience, I can say that the tests did contain some difficult questions, but there were certainly a vast amount of simple questions (majority of MCQ and the first few questions of Section II) that would adequately allow every student to show that they have attained a satisfactory level of understanding in each topic, with these questions often being referred to as the "free marks" questions. Despite the wishes from a large body of students wanting to have more "doable" questions, I believe that the original purpose of a test is to test a student's capabilities/limits and identify the best students, as such, the inclusion of the more abstract questions better tested a person's mathematical thinking rather than the ability to use a formula or a formatted method. This would allow for better separation between those who are truly good at maths from those who are 'good' at maths because they could do questions that follow the format of the thousands of questions available for practice.

From what I understand, the difficulty of each Mathematics course has been lowered with every revision, with some topics being dropped, or topics from lower levels of maths being moved to a higher level course. In addition, looking at the percentage of high school leavers going to university in the past compared to today, we can see there have been improvements in trying to provide more opportunities for people to enter university. Personally, I don't think the lowering of standards is very optimal, especially looking at how if high school content is being made easier and easier or the bar is set lower, the ability to transfer from high school maths to university-level maths (in courses that have a main focus on it, e.g. Engineering) would be quite difficult due to one's lacking mathematical ability.

Another point /+ TL;DR:
The level of difficulty of Australian secondary schools is quite laughable in the Asia-Pacific region. The reality is that the HSC is disgustingly easy compared to other tests in the world, e.g. GaoKao of China, NEET of India, and CSAT of Korea., and thinking that making the test somewhat harder (still well behind in difficulty relative to the fore-mentioned tests) is an issue of the paper makers and not the Australian education system is comical.

 

[yanujw]

I think they should make ext 1 a 100 mark, 3-hour paper to address the concerns. There is no way you can test the scope of 12 topics effectively in 70 marks, or provide a range of easy to difficult questions, or sustain interesting and sophisticated questions with only 60 marks of short answer.

 

[Run hard@thehsc]

I think they should make ext 1 a 100 mark, 3-hour paper to address the concerns. There is no way you can test the scope of 12 topics effectively in 70 marks, or provide a range of easy to difficult questions, or sustain interesting and sophisticated questions with only 60 marks of short answer.

honestly this is a good idea.... i get it is one unit for advanced students, but this would make it more fair in terms of the topics tested and the difficulty of the questions...

 

[Auzendriel]

I think they should make ext 1 a 100 mark, 3-hour paper to address the concerns. There is no way you can test the scope of 12 topics effectively in 70 marks, or provide a range of easy to difficult questions, or sustain interesting and sophisticated questions with only 60 marks of short answer.

I agree. I honestly had no chance with this year's paper. There was just an overload of stats and stuff like integration felt scarce

 

[Run hard@thehsc]

I agree. I honestly had no chance with this year's paper. There was just an overload of stats and stuff like integration felt scarce

fair - Ig this is why NESA has different alignment standards. Hoping this the alignment somewhat compensate the greater relative difficulty of this year's paper.

 

[Trebla]

I think they should make ext 1 a 100 mark, 3-hour paper to address the concerns. There is no way you can test the scope of 12 topics effectively in 70 marks, or provide a range of easy to difficult questions, or sustain interesting and sophisticated questions with only 60 marks of short answer.

Speaking from experience writing the BoS trials, the irony is that the Ext2 paper is very spacious with plenty of room to fit in just 1 year of content into 100 marks, whereas the Ext1 paper has hardly any room to squeeze in 2 years of content into 70 marks.

 

[Run hard@thehsc]

Speaking from experience writing the BoS trials, the irony is that the Ext2 paper is very spacious with plenty of room to fit in just 1 year of content into 100 marks, whereas the Ext1 paper has hardly any room to squeeze in 2 years of content into 70 marks.

is this possibly the reason why 3u and 4u alignment are somewhat similar, despite the differing difficulties of the course content?

 

[d1zzyohs]

From my experience, I can say that the tests did contain some difficult questions, but there were certainly a vast amount of simple questions (majority of MCQ and the first few questions of Section II) that would adequately allow every student to show that they have attained a satisfactory level of understanding in each topic, with these questions often being referred to as the "free marks" questions. Despite the wishes from a large body of students wanting to have more "doable" questions, I believe that the original purpose of a test is to test a student's capabilities/limits and identify the best students, as such, the inclusion of the more abstract questions better tested a person's mathematical thinking rather than the ability to use a formula or a formatted method. This would allow for better separation between those who are truly good at maths from those who are 'good' at maths because they could do questions that follow the format of the thousands of questions available for practice.

From what I understand, the difficulty of each Mathematics course has been lowered with every revision, with some topics being dropped, or topics from lower levels of maths being moved to a higher level course. In addition, looking at the percentage of high school leavers going to university in the past compared to today, we can see there have been improvements in trying to provide more opportunities for people to enter university. Personally, I don't think the lowering of standards is very optimal, especially looking at how if high school content is being made easier and easier or the bar is set lower, the ability to transfer from high school maths to university-level maths (in courses that have a main focus on it, e.g. Engineering) would be quite difficult due to one's lacking mathematical ability.

Another point /+ TL;DR:
The level of difficulty of Australian secondary schools is quite laughable in the Asia-Pacific region. The reality is that the HSC is disgustingly easy compared to other tests in the world, e.g. GaoKao of China, NEET of India, and CSAT of Korea., and thinking that making the test somewhat harder (still well behind in difficulty relative to the fore-mentioned tests) is an issue of the paper makers and not the Australian education system is comical.

your tl;dr is a bit strange.
it's easy to look at gaokao, NEET, and CSAT (called seuneung), and gawk at how difficult the exams are, because of how the media and society represents migrant students. comparing gaokao, neet and csat to maths extension 2, is actually far more similar then different.
Consider these JEE past questions:

Mathematics | JEE Main Previous Year Questions - ExamSIDE.Com

JEE Main Mathematics's Sets and Relations, Logarithm, Quadratic Equation and Inequalities, Sequences and Series, Mathematical Induction, Binomial Theorem, Matrices and Determinants, Permutations and Combinations, Probability, Vector Algebra, 3D Geometry, Complex Numbers, Statistics, Mathematical...

questions.examside.com

Consider the CSAT past question (this is the hardest question in the exam):

While these questions are definitely harder than then HSC papers we've gotten so far, it definitely isn't a moonshot compared to some NSB and James Ruse questions we've seen. I'll remind people that not every takes the CSAT in Korea - especially the hard version everyone thinks about. There are different lines students can take, and the hard maths variant is generally taken by engineering/STEM students.

So:
1. What we learn is incredibly similar (between MX2, and CSAT, JEE etc.) (CSAT english is called difficult, but really... what the HSC asks of us to do is far more difficult; CSAT is multiple choice, as well as Korean being mostly multiple choice and short answer).
2. We shouldn't glamorise these countries testing schemes, because they have the highest student suicide rates in the world. We should strive to be a country which is successful.
3. We shouldn't be reaching to the standards of these countries, because even though their exams are 'so much harder', our top universities are very similar in ranking. (UNSW, USYD, ANU compared to Seoul National University).

What benefit do we have from over-exerting our high school students? We're 18, and to define our entire lives (which many of these foreign countries do), on a high school exam, is beyond idiotic.

 

[Auzendriel]

your tl;dr is a bit strange.
it's easy to look at gaokao, NEET, and CSAT (called seuneung), and gawk at how difficult the exams are, because of how the media and society represents migrant students. comparing gaokao, neet and csat to maths extension 2, is actually far more similar then different.
Consider these JEE past questions:

Mathematics | JEE Main Previous Year Questions - ExamSIDE.Com

JEE Main Mathematics's Sets and Relations, Logarithm, Quadratic Equation and Inequalities, Sequences and Series, Mathematical Induction, Binomial Theorem, Matrices and Determinants, Permutations and Combinations, Probability, Vector Algebra, 3D Geometry, Complex Numbers, Statistics, Mathematical...

questions.examside.com

Consider the CSAT past question (this is the hardest question in the exam):

While these questions are definitely harder than then HSC papers we've gotten so far, it definitely isn't a moonshot compared to some NSB and James Ruse questions we've seen. I'll remind people that not every takes the CSAT in Korea - especially the hard version everyone thinks about. There are different lines students can take, and the hard maths variant is generally taken by engineering/STEM students.

So:
1. What we learn is incredibly similar (between MX2, and CSAT, JEE etc.) (CSAT english is called difficult, but really... what the HSC asks of us to do is far more difficult; CSAT is multiple choice, as well as Korean being mostly multiple choice and short answer).
2. We shouldn't glamorise these countries testing schemes, because they have the highest student suicide rates in the world. We should strive to be a country which is successful.
3. We shouldn't be reaching to the standards of these countries, because even though their exams are 'so much harder', our top universities are very similar in ranking. (UNSW, USYD, ANU compared to Seoul National University).

What benefit do we have from over-exerting our high school students? We're 18, and to define our entire lives (which many of these foreign countries do), on a high school exam, is beyond idiotic.

Really nicely written and I wholeheartedly agree. As a Chinese immigrant that last sentence hit hard - if I had to stay in China and do the Gaokao it would've been really fucked up. The Gaokao quite literally defines students' lives there.

 

[Run hard@thehsc]

your tl;dr is a bit strange.
it's easy to look at gaokao, NEET, and CSAT (called seuneung), and gawk at how difficult the exams are, because of how the media and society represents migrant students. comparing gaokao, neet and csat to maths extension 2, is actually far more similar then different.
Consider these JEE past questions:

Mathematics | JEE Main Previous Year Questions - ExamSIDE.Com

JEE Main Mathematics's Sets and Relations, Logarithm, Quadratic Equation and Inequalities, Sequences and Series, Mathematical Induction, Binomial Theorem, Matrices and Determinants, Permutations and Combinations, Probability, Vector Algebra, 3D Geometry, Complex Numbers, Statistics, Mathematical...

questions.examside.com

Consider the CSAT past question (this is the hardest question in the exam):

While these questions are definitely harder than then HSC papers we've gotten so far, it definitely isn't a moonshot compared to some NSB and James Ruse questions we've seen. I'll remind people that not every takes the CSAT in Korea - especially the hard version everyone thinks about. There are different lines students can take, and the hard maths variant is generally taken by engineering/STEM students.

So:
1. What we learn is incredibly similar (between MX2, and CSAT, JEE etc.) (CSAT english is called difficult, but really... what the HSC asks of us to do is far more difficult; CSAT is multiple choice, as well as Korean being mostly multiple choice and short answer).
2. We shouldn't glamorise these countries testing schemes, because they have the highest student suicide rates in the world. We should strive to be a country which is successful.
3. We shouldn't be reaching to the standards of these countries, because even though their exams are 'so much harder', our top universities are very similar in ranking. (UNSW, USYD, ANU compared to Seoul National University).

What benefit do we have from over-exerting our high school students? We're 18, and to define our entire lives (which many of these foreign countries do), on a high school exam, is beyond idiotic.

Pretty much sums up my perception. Nicely said

 

[Trebla]

is this possibly the reason why 3u and 4u alignment are somewhat similar, despite the differing difficulties of the course content?

It is not really valid to compare alignments between subjects in the first place given they are not about reflections of difficulty. They can only be comparable between years for the same subject.

Alignment is more about the “standards” one expects of a band E4 student etc, which is somewhat independent of course content difficulty. For example, NESA could have easily “changed the standards” and made the cut-off for an E4 in Ext2 to be like 94/100 or 50/100 if they really wanted to. Does that mean the course content suddenly got more/less difficult? No, it’s the same content but they just redefined the standards and this has zero direct impact on scaling for the ATAR.

 

[notme123]

Another point /+ TL;DR:
The level of difficulty of Australian secondary schools is quite laughable in the Asia-Pacific region. The reality is that the HSC is disgustingly easy compared to other tests in the world, e.g. GaoKao of China, NEET of India, and CSAT of Korea., and thinking that making the test somewhat harder (still well behind in difficulty relative to the fore-mentioned tests) is an issue of the paper makers and not the Australian education system is comical.

I dont think that the difficult of the HSC needs to be changed. Not to be general but Australian students work ethic does not seem as diligent as gaokao students. Year 12 retention rates would be much lower because people simply would not be willing to put in the effort, or people would juts not choose harder subjects. Remember the HSC is not as big as the gaokao either so the talent pool is much smaller. You also cannot just change Year 12 without changing the syllabus of lower years. Imagine going through year 10 which is the most relaxed year of schooling and go straight to studying beyond compare. So ye the education system is to an extent an issue.

 

[idkkdi]

your tl;dr is a bit strange.
it's easy to look at gaokao, NEET, and CSAT (called seuneung), and gawk at how difficult the exams are, because of how the media and society represents migrant students. comparing gaokao, neet and csat to maths extension 2, is actually far more similar then different.
Consider these JEE past questions:

Mathematics | JEE Main Previous Year Questions - ExamSIDE.Com

JEE Main Mathematics's Sets and Relations, Logarithm, Quadratic Equation and Inequalities, Sequences and Series, Mathematical Induction, Binomial Theorem, Matrices and Determinants, Permutations and Combinations, Probability, Vector Algebra, 3D Geometry, Complex Numbers, Statistics, Mathematical...

questions.examside.com

Consider the CSAT past question (this is the hardest question in the exam):

While these questions are definitely harder than then HSC papers we've gotten so far, it definitely isn't a moonshot compared to some NSB and James Ruse questions we've seen. I'll remind people that not every takes the CSAT in Korea - especially the hard version everyone thinks about. There are different lines students can take, and the hard maths variant is generally taken by engineering/STEM students.

So:
1. What we learn is incredibly similar (between MX2, and CSAT, JEE etc.) (CSAT english is called difficult, but really... what the HSC asks of us to do is far more difficult; CSAT is multiple choice, as well as Korean being mostly multiple choice and short answer).
2. We shouldn't glamorise these countries testing schemes, because they have the highest student suicide rates in the world. We should strive to be a country which is successful.
3. We shouldn't be reaching to the standards of these countries, because even though their exams are 'so much harder', our top universities are very similar in ranking. (UNSW, USYD, ANU compared to Seoul National University).

What benefit do we have from over-exerting our high school students? We're 18, and to define our entire lives (which many of these foreign countries do), on a high school exam, is beyond idiotic.

1. Only mathsx2 is similar-ish. Oh ye also, for mx2 we should be trying to compare to JEE Advanced. ignore english for them, cuz second language.

If u look at chem/phys, that's where differences in difficulty becomes very obvious, especially with the cookie-cutter phys we do. Look at JEE Advanced chem/phys lmfao.

2. Ye perhaps a bit glamorised.

3. University rankings are absolute bullshit. They depend on a variety of factors, including some arguably irrelevant and unfair metrics. Seoul National University students would absolutely smoke students at any uni in australia in STEM.

The last idea of 'over-exerting' is wrong. What should be argued is that we're on average clearly 'under-exerting' students, and we should reach some level of exertion somewhere in between HSC and other countries. By virtue of the HSC being so flexible in what subjects you choose, sacrifice is made, and students can opt for easy choices.
There is everything to be gained by raising the average education level.

Defining lives is pretty idiotic, but pragmatic. In Aus, where we have so many resources for so little people, we fortunately do not have to 'cull' as much. This allows us the luxury of having less selective tests, but nonetheless, this is not an excuse to under-educate the populace, and be less competitive globally.

I dont think that the difficult of the HSC needs to be changed. Not to be general but Australian students work ethic does not seem as diligent as gaokao students. Year 12 retention rates would be much lower because people simply would not be willing to put in the effort, or people would juts not choose harder subjects. Remember the HSC is not as big as the gaokao either so the talent pool is much smaller. You also cannot just change Year 12 without changing the syllabus of lower years. Imagine going through year 10 which is the most relaxed year of schooling and go straight to studying beyond compare. So ye the education system is to an extent an issue.

Yes, the main problem is the culture of not putting in effort. Perhaps there is something to be gained from deleting standard subjects, and other easier subjects to force people to attempt harder ones.
Lower retention rates could be good, if balanced properly against increasing the average ability of the people who are retained.

Yes the lower years is an absolute problem. Primary schools should be improved. Teaching is way too lax in junior years. Science and maths should be properly introduced and taught to build solid fundamentals, from which Yr12 STEM can be made harder. I'm sure the sacrifice that comes with actually learning during junior years (if that is a sacrifice) can be made up for by the smoother transition.

 

[Nedom]

Definitely agree with notme123 and idkkdi. (Didn't really wanna write up a whole ass essay to post so I didn't really cover many aspects in my first comment)

Yes, the main problem is the culture of not putting in effort. Perhaps there is something to be gained from deleting standard subjects, and other easier subjects to force people to attempt harder ones.
Lower retention rates could be good, if balanced properly against increasing the average ability of the people who are retained.

Yes the lower years is an absolute problem. Primary schools should be improved. Teaching is way too lax in junior years. Science and maths should be properly introduced and taught to build solid fundamentals, from which Yr12 STEM can be made harder. I'm sure the sacrifice that comes with actually learning during junior years (if that is a sacrifice) can be made up for by the smoother transition.

To build on idkkdi's comments:
I don't know if this is just me being depressed, edgy or just simply 'Asian parent' mindset, but I don't really believe there is such thing as a childhood. More often than not, there are many parents/people (probably not Asian, hahaha) that advocate for children to have a proper childhood and thus use that as a foundational argument for the need to maintain the status quo of the Australian education system of being a relaxed one. But what is a proper childhood? How much does one even remember from their childhood? There are certainly things that evoke nostalgia, such as toys, food (especially from a loved one), games or a location, etc., but how many of the memories that accompany them are actually vivid, and/or we can say that encompassed a long X amount of years my childhood, where we can actually identify the value of X. What I'm trying to get at is that the Australian culture of being lax is certainly what makes the country great and very much enjoyable, but that doesn't mean that it should be applied to every aspect, certainly not the education of the children that are the country's future (in China, students are referred to as "祖国的花朵,国家的栋梁“, "flowers of the country, the pillars of the country" translated, referring to the hope in students as the country invests into them (like flowers that need maintenance/catering for) as they will become pillars of the country, but also a flower being symbolic of youth and hope/brightness).

If children in a country like China (chose cause I am the most familiar with it in the Asia region) are still able to have a 'childhood' even though many are forced/pushed into extracurricular activities, it goes to show that you do not require the many years which Australian children have to actually attain a childhood. Through the 'sacrifice' (if it even counts as one - which idkkdi also commented on) of some time in junior years to develop an understanding of the fields that awaits them, students can actually attain a proper foundational understanding of what they may want to do in university to lessen the impact from the escalation of difficulty between high school and university. It also will stop some people from wasting years of uni jumping between courses because they didn't really understand what they were getting into, or just didn't truly know what they enjoy.

On the topic of stress. Personally, don't really care. This may come across as quite extreme, but I think emotions only come in the way of efficiency (yes, empthay ties with morals and ethics, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). If a person is passionate about something they will dedicate themselves to it, and typically, desire is quite an unstoppable force. This may not be always true, but "No pain. No gain".