There were 72,000 students who sat for the HSC in New South Wales this year, the largest contingent ever. But they will have to wait until 9am tomorrow to find out their university entrance rankings from the Universities Admission Centre.
Two young men who won’t have to worry about getting into university are Timothy Large 17 and Harry Stratton 18 from Sydney Grammar. These two debating partners have been schoolmates for eight years and they decided to take identical course programs. They were equal first in Classical Greek continuers - Harry topped Classical Greek extension and Latin continuers while Timothy came first in the extension two course for mathematics. President of the Board of Studies Tom Alegounarias said “Topping an HSC exam is one thing but topping two, especially in different subject areas, puts a student in an entirely different realm.”
But Timothy Large doesn’t think the exam is hard enough. “Hard is good” he said. ''One of the things the Board needs the power to do is to throw up examination papers which students do find incredibly difficult because that's the sort of thing which stops cultures of coaching, drilling and general practice which are the absolute opposite of what you want to see in education,'' he said. He fears coaching is robbing maths of its essence, the opportunity to learn analytical and creative thought processes.
"When you start talking about students going to cram schools on the weekends and doing completely ludicrous amounts of drill exercises then really you are taking something away from the subject,'' Timothy said. “Unfortunately it works – maths is one of the subjects where coaching really, really helps you get higher results”. Timothy who was never coached himself believes about 60-70 per cent of his classmates at Grammar and almost all students at other top achieving schools like Sydney Boys High and James Ruse, undertook this form of study.
Timothy will pursue mathematics at university and Harry plans to study law.
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