THE LONG GAME
Sophie Moeller faces the HSC, again
IT MIGHT be the October long weekend, but on paper, it’s 1934. Daylight saving has become The Night of the Long Knives. I should know, I’ve done the HSC four times now, and it’s not getting any easier.
Grand final fever can be smelled on barbecues all over the neighbourhood, but no matter the winner, there’ll be no celebrations in this house. There are modern history essays to memorise and the party is still a month away. With a week to go before my son meets his examiner, I have a regime to uphold.
The fridge brims with snacks and the mind with: “when will this ever end”. Cups of tea and coffee are on rotation, acting as anchors to the desk.
By now, I am desensitised to their pain. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got it worse than anyone. Next year, it’s my youngest child destined for the markers, and I’ll have to do it all over again.
To her horror, I’ve told my fourth “don’t be surprised if its me on the shoulders of some Gold Coast random at Schoolies 2020”, such will be my joy at getting all my children through. If there is even such a thing as Mothers’ Schoolies, let me know?
So here is my takeaways from the Higher School Certificate experience.
From the day the marks come out, no one ever mentions them again. Like a toddler tasting its paintbrush for the first time, it’s just another rite of passage. It’s about learning your limits.
It is interesting to note the word ‘educate’ comes from the Latin word “educare”, meaning to “bring up, rear”. In the 1500s, Shakespeare borrowed it to mean “schooling.”
They say “memorisation is the lowest form of intelligence” and we all know, the week-before-cramming will be forgotten before ‘pens down’ is even uttered. But, I’ve come to learn there is one thing the whole standardising sausage machine does do well; it teaches grit.
Life ain’t always easy. There are certain things you just gotta do and there are times in life when discipline is needed. Achieving a useful ATAR is one of them.
Despite increased competition over the years, things have lightened up a little in recent times though. Cultural beliefs around what success looks like have changed a lot.
Back in the 1980s, when I did the HSC (first time around), intelligence was measured out of 500. Women like me — who were the poster girls for “we can do anything” — felt like, unless we got 495 and went on to do Medicine or Law, we were kind of letting the side down.
Nowadays, there’s a different formula: success equals pursuit over passion.
Kids are told to choose subjects they love. And thankfully, the sort of standardised testing, which sees IQ in terms of: “a, b, c or d”, is increasingly on the nose.
In his book The Years That Matter Most, journalist Paul Tough, points out that America’s HSC equivalent of the college entry test, the SAT exam, has become an unreliable indicator of how a student will perform once at university. As in Australia, students are increasingly using their school grades to plot their path through early entry into higher education.
In other words, what we teach in schools today has become more important than ever. The big picture is not a series of multiple-choice questions but more a patchwork quilt. Wouldn’t it be great, for all concerned, if we could cover exams in the same way?