After years of hard work, hundreds of Year 12 students at Dubbo made each minute count for two challenging hours on Monday.
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They were some of the more than 70,000 NSW students to start the written exams for their Higher School Certificates on Monday.
Emerging after completing the English paper, Dubbo College student Ethan Hughes, 17, said he was feeling relieved to have the first exam done.
“It wasn’t too bad, there were a couple of moments when I had to think what I was putting down, but I’m happy with what I got out,” he said.
Fellow student Ashwini Manorathan said she was feeling pretty confident.
In the HSC lead-up the aspiring medical student had found the support from English teacher Marie Speer “amazing”.
“She’s the best teacher ever, always willing to give up her own time to look at exams and give you feedback,” Ashwini said.
Ms Speer said both advanced and standard subject students completed the same paper and were asked to analyse unseen texts in relation to the discovery subject outline.
“They were also asked to complete a piece of creative writing exploring the topic of discovery, as well as writing an extended response in relation to the poetry of Robert Frost,” she said.
“I think it was a very fair exam paper and I believe our students were very well prepared to tackle it.”