Student finds similarities to Western Australian exams
contacted over the weekend reporter with a summary of the similarities between the two articles.
“I just think HSC documents are too risky, they all have to be original. I don’t think they are copied from other states’ documents.”
“I can accept that the content to be evaluated in biology is limited and that there must be similarities between papers, but the almost direct copies in terms of wording, answer choices and data make this difficult to accept.
“If high standards of academic integrity are applied to students, the same should surely apply to those who write exams. This raises serious questions about equality and integrity in the HSC system.”
In one of the questions, students were presented with the variation of an animal’s body temperature with changes in air temperature between 18.8 and 27.5 degrees.
Loading
These air temperatures are the same as those in the 2022 Western Australia test.
Dr. CrookED Science science education consultant. Simon Crook said that exact temperatures between 15 and 30 degrees have a statistical probability of more than 11 trillion times the odds of occurring in the same order to one decimal place.
“If they were smart, they could put new numbers on the air temperature, but they couldn’t even do that,” he said.
“I think a lot of people will be really angry. It’s laziness. We have underpaid and overworked teachers here trying to do things properly. But something like this, teachers can live and die professionally by their HSC exam results and if some students have an advantage because some teachers give them past WA questions, that’s hugely unfair.”
Elizabeth Thrum, head of science at Knox Grammar, which has previously produced HSC mock biology exams, said Year 12 biology courses for NSW and Western Australia were both based on Australia’s national curriculum.
“While I accept there are some similarities in the wording, the Australian curriculum we teach, the questions we ask will be very similar,” he said.
The NESA spokesperson also drew attention to the common curriculum.
“NESA has stringent processes to protect the integrity and confidentiality of exams throughout the development and writing process,” he said.
“Questions in the 2025 NSW HSC Biology exam align with content studied in the NSW Biology curriculum, including concepts related to genetics, mutations and diseases. These concepts are not specific to the NSW curriculum.”
Question 29 in the HSC paper asked students to “explain TWO procedures that can be implemented to prevent the spread of the Varroa mite in honey bees.”
Loading
Question 24 of the 2021 Western Australian biology exam asked students to outline “two measures that could be used to reduce the likelihood of this mite becoming established in Australia.”
Tabitha Jimenez, HSC biology coordinator for education firm Matrix Education, said questions about chromosomes in fruit flies are quite common and considered classic questions.
“Humans actually have very similar sex chromosomes, so they have an x and a y, and not all animals are like that,” he said.
But others, such as the Varroa mite in bees, do not, he said.
“Question 29 is the question I’m surprised is how similar it is…it’s kind of the same,” he said.
