Monday’s maths exams have been criticised by some students who did not feel prepared for the level of difficulty in new common questions. Test them here yourself.

“The common content was from a variety of different topics. It was definitely difficult for some of the students to answer those questions some were really thrown.”
The common elements included a two-part, 4-mark financial maths question that involved calculating interest, and a 4-mark question asking students to calculate the area of a decagon based on its perimeter. One of the more puzzling questions was a 5-mark statistics problem.
Can you do the common content?
Those questions will give the NSW Education Standards Authority and the Universities Admissions Centre data that allows for a better comparison of student performance across the two subjects.
It follows years of concern that advanced students were being disadvantaged in scaling while their peers opted for the easier maths course to score higher marks and boost their ATAR. Almost 17,000 students sat the advanced exam on Monday, while 30,757 sat the standard test.
Parramatta High student Manya Jain, who sat the new advanced exam, said she felt relatively prepared despite a lack of past papers. “It was definitely challenging, but it has to be the first year,” she said.
But standard maths student Rasheel Tannous, from St Mary’s, had a very different experience. “That exam was one of the hardest exams I have come across,” she said. “During my reading time, I really thought that the papers with advanced and standard got mixed up.”
She thought most of the shared questions were too advanced for her knowledge, and regretted that she did not have a full grasp of some topics that had been taught during lockdown earlier this year.
Manly student Lydia Virgo agreed. “The last thing I expected was for NESA to make the exam 10 times more difficult than last year’s exam. There were terms used in some questions that I had never even heard of before,” she said.
“Some questions I had to read and re-read at least five times to finally understand. And then there were just some questions I didnt even know how to approach. Im extremely disappointed.”
Mathematical Association of NSW president Karen McDaid said teachers were reporting that the common questions had not been well received. Standard students found the 5-mark statistics question, which was second-last in their exam, particularly difficult.
“Some teachers are saying that their students are very upset and that the standard paper was hard,” one teacher said. “Students are upset that they hadn’t known what to expect,” another said.
A NESA spokeswoman said the authority had “received feedback from a number of students and parents about today’s Maths Standard 2 exam being difficult”.
“NESA confirms that all questions asked within todays Maths Standard 2 exam were within the scope of the syllabus,” she said. “All HSC exam papers are designed to differentiate student achievement. NESA will monitor marking of the Maths Standard 2 paper very closely.”
Dr Julie Greenhalgh, principal of Meriden, which typically performs well in maths, had a similar view. ”The standard paper was more difficult than previously but not inappropriately so,” she said.
“The advanced paper covered a wide range of topics and many questions were accessible, particularly those on the new syllabus content. There was an appropriate mix of routine, familiar questions from the old format, interspersed with the new.”