T he 20-mark essay question in this year’s HSC English 1 paper asked students to “analyse how the representation of particular lives in your prescribed text enriches your understanding of the endurance of the human spirit.”

But in the final moments of Thursday’s exam, Cumberland high school pupils in Sydney were living out their own story of endurance; their desks strewn with papers, their shoulders hunched forward, leavers jerseys hanging off chairs.

As the clock ticked over to 11.30am, there were visible sighs of relief as students closed the booklet on the first of this year’s HSC exams.

“It was down to the last minute, essentially,” says year 12 student Abby Meguerditchian of the English advanced paper, although she says she was able to divide her time between short and long answ

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