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Media strategist Liz Nable, whose eldest daughter sits the HSC from October 13, argues that telling average students the exam does not matter is counterproductive, because the mark is a mirror for self-belief rather than a measure for others.
Liz Nable's eldest daughter sits her HSC from October 13, making this her first experience of the exam as a parent. Her daughter attends a public high school, the latest stop on a 13-year tour of Catholic primary, a private girls' school and a private boys' school.
One thing, she writes, has been fumbled the same way in every system, and it has nothing to do with fees or facilities. It is what adults tell average kids about the HSC and about schooling in general. For students chasing medicine, law or astrophysics, the number they receive on December 16 undeniably matters. Nable is not writing about them.
Why Telling Students It Does Not Matter Backfires
She is writing about everyone else: the great middle, the kids sitting between the 15th and 90th percentile, which is to say almost all of them. These are the ones never in the running for a 99 ATAR, who have worked out that the adults around them have quietly stopped expecting much, under the guise of it being too much pressure. We tell those kids the HSC does not matter. It is just a mark.
There are a million pathways. Nable does not disagree, and school is not the only place a person finds out who they are. Kids prove themselves on sporting fields and in music rooms, in first jobs, in trades, and in businesses they start at 23 with no idea what they are doing. They travel, they make things, they show up for people, they give back.
There are genuinely a million ways forward from here. But telling them it does not matter is counterproductive, she argues. Otherwise every hard thing that comes at them for the rest of their life becomes another chance to opt out. Another opportunity to find a reason it does not really count, and to face it half-heartedly.
That is a habit, and habits set. If the HSC did not matter, what was the point of any of this? What was the point of the past 13 years of schooling? Nable has come to believe the HSC is not a measurement.
The HSC As A Personal Mirror
It is a mirror. Consider the student who has always been a 50 per cent kid. If that kid genuinely applies themselves for the first time, they might get 70. The goal of the 70 is not to unlock a particular degree, and it is not for boasting.
Nobody ever hears the mark. No employer asks. Friends do not know it. The mark has almost no external audience.
Which means the only person that 70 is addressed to is the kid who earned it. What it says to them is this: when I apply myself, the ceiling moves. That is what self-confidence actually is. Real confidence is evidence-based.
It is built from a small pile of occasions on which you did something you did not think you could do, and it cannot be gifted, bought, coached or faked. It has to be earned by the person, in their own name. That is why the HSC is quietly one of the biggest confidence-building opportunities we hand our kids, and one of the few we then talk them out of taking.
A 17-year-old who sets a target, works for it for months and hits it has laid down a piece of evidence about themselves that no future setback can fully erase. That is not about school. That is about who they think they are. We have a generation of kids backing themselves into corners before they have had a go.
Disproving Negative Self Narratives
I am just not good at maths. I am not academic. I am hopeless at English, so I will not bother. That voice in their head starts young and hardens fast.
If that story runs unchallenged for long enough, it stops being a story. It becomes the person. The HSC, for a middle-band kid, is the first structured chance to test whether that voice is telling the truth, to sit down and disprove themselves with nobody able to do it for them. And it almost never is telling the truth.
So the most useful sentence a parent can offer this October is not it does not matter. It is this: do not do it for me, do it for yourself. Not for the ATAR. Not for a degree.
A Message Parents Should Offer
Not for your teachers or your friends. Do it so that in six weeks, when you get your results, you know something about yourself that you do not know today. Most of these kids will not get a 99, and in 10 years almost none of them will remember their number. What they will remember is whether they found out what they were capable of.
When kids genuinely apply themselves, they surprise themselves, discovering that when they set their mind to something, anything is possible. You cannot teach a child that. They have to catch themselves doing it. The HSC, for all its faults, is the first real chance most of them get.
Liz Nable is a media and communications strategist, a small business advocate, a mother of three and a Year 12 parent this year.
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theage:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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