A visit to the zoo in a wheelchair and alcoholic drinks: Inside the HSC maths exams

If you are visiting a steep zoo in a wheelchair, what is the best path to see the lions from the penguin exhibition? What time would you need to leave to make it for feeding time?

It’s a question HSC standard maths student Darnish Noori struggled with: “I did not manage to finish it.”

The Parramatta High student was one of 31,698 students who tackled the HSC standard maths 2 exam on Monday, wrestling with questions about zoos, the probability of students wearing the correct uniform, and how long it took for a 72-kilogram man to consume three drinks, based on a formula and the time it took for his blood alcohol level to return to zero.

Parramatta High student Nithya Potlakayala described the zoo question as one of the easiest in the test, once you got past the scenario.

The three-part question was designed to test students’ understanding of networks: their ability to use graph theory to model, analyse and optimise real-world systems. Students were presented with two network images of a zoo – one showing the lengths of paths between exhibits and another presenting the gradient of each path.

Advised that the zoo visitor – Nikolai – was in a wheelchair that could only traverse gradients below a certain threshold, students had to explain why the best path for Nikolai was not necessarily the shortest, what the best path was, and the latest time he could leave to watch the lion feeding.

“I really hate these questions – they are easy, but my brain doesn’t process the information,” Potlakayala said. She skipped the question, heading to the harder ones and circling back to it later. She finds it is best to blur out the scenario; only the numbers matter and what they represent.

The advanced maths exam has previously come under fire from teachers for being too wordy and overloading students with unnecessary information.

Both Potlakayala and Noori used artificial intelligence to prepare for their exams, feeding chatbots past papers to generate new practice questions.

“I used it to generate more challenging and more specific questions. It was able to actively accommodate whatever I am struggling with,” Noori said.

Renuka Parmesh and Mayukh Mandala were part of the more than 16,000 year 12 students who completed the advanced maths exam, describing it as “a little less complicated” than last year’s.

A question about loan repayments had both Parmesh and Mandala scratching their heads.

“It was significantly harder than anything I’ve really encountered,” Parmesh said. “In this particular question, there were were a couple of extra steps you had to do before determining the sequence you had, and it was not very clear where to really start off. That’s what really threw me off, and that’s what I feel like threw a lot of people off as well.”

Mandala said he was scrambling at the end. “The fact that we had to balance so much in such less time, and especially towards the end ... that was very pressurising.”

Maths teacher Deepti Asija said it was a good exam: “It was achievable but not impossible – it was designed to reward hard work.”

HSC exams continue until November 5.

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