HSC
HSC practice exams with worked solutions
Practice exams for NSW students, set out as the papers are: a multiple-choice section, then short answers numbered straight on, each carrying its own marks. Every written question comes with a model answer and a note on what the marks were for. Year 10 is included, because the work that makes Year 11 manageable is done before it starts.
Studying in Victoria? VCE subjects →Subjects
4 subjects, 52 practice papers. Each subject page has sample questions you can try now without an account.
How an HSC paper is put together
The NSW papers have a shape that barely changes between subjects, and knowing it beforehand is worth a week of revision on its own.
- Multiple choice first, then short answers
- The multiple choice is not the easy part. It is the part where a careless minute costs exactly as much as a hard question later, and where students who are still settling in lose marks they would have got an hour further into the paper.
- Every question carries its marks in the margin
- Marks tell you how many creditable points the marker is looking for and, just as usefully, how long to spend. A six-mark question answered in two lines has been misread, however good the two lines are.
- The verb in the question is an instruction
- Describe, explain, assess, evaluate and justify ask for different things and are marked differently. NESA publishes what each one requires, and the difference between describing and explaining is routinely the difference between half marks and full marks.
- Reading time is planning time
- Use it to find the long questions and decide the order. Meeting the most expensive question in the paper with fifteen minutes left is a planning failure, not a knowledge one.
Why Year 10 is here
Year 10 is on this page deliberately. The algebra and the scientific reasoning that Year 11 assumes from its first week are built in Year 10, and a student who arrives without them spends the year translating instead of learning.
It is also the cheapest place to fix a gap. A weakness in rearranging equations costs an afternoon to repair in Year 10 and a term in Year 12, by which time it is tangled up with everything built on top of it.
Nothing here is a substitute for the school's own programme. It is a way to find out, before the year starts, which of the assumed skills are actually there.
Marking your own answers, and why we ask you to
Short answers are shown beside a model response and the marks it carries, and you award your own marks. That is not us saving effort — it is the exercise.
A marker decides whether each required idea is present in what you wrote. Doing that to your own answer makes you read what is on the page rather than what you intended, and that gap is where most lost marks live. It is also the only reliable way to learn what "explain" is worth against "describe" without sitting the real thing first.
Mark strictly. A mark awarded for something a marker would not find is a mark lost again later, having practised believing it was safe.
What to do with a finished paper
The score is the least useful thing a practice paper produces. Sort the wrong answers instead: rushed, half-known, or genuinely not known. Only the last is a content problem, and it is usually the smallest pile.
Work under time from the first paper. Most of the difficulty in an HSC exam is the clock, and a paper done at leisure measures something the exam will not ask for.
Syllabuses, exam timetables and past papers are NESA's and change. We do not restate them here — a stale date on a study site is worse than none.
Common questions
- Which years are covered?
- Year 10 Maths and Science, and Year 11 Biology and Chemistry, with more subjects being added. Year 10 matters more than it looks: the algebra and the scientific reasoning built there are assumed from the first week of Year 11.
- How does the marking work?
- Multiple choice is marked automatically. For short answers you are shown the model response and the marks it carries, and you award your own — which forces you to read the model closely instead of glancing at it.
- Are these NESA papers?
- No. They are practice papers written to the same structure as HSC exams. Past NESA papers are published free on the NESA website and are worth working through as well.
- When are the HSC exams held?
- In the second half of the year, on a timetable NESA publishes each year. We do not repeat the dates here because they move, and a stale date on a study site is worse than none.
- What is the difference between describe, explain and evaluate?
- They are instructions, not synonyms, and they are marked differently. Describing sets out features; explaining says why or how; evaluating weighs something against criteria and commits to a judgement. NESA publishes what each requires, and answering the wrong one is one of the commonest ways to lose marks you had the knowledge to earn.
- Does Year 10 work really matter for the HSC?
- Not directly — it is not assessed. But Year 11 assumes it from the first week, and a gap in Year 10 algebra or scientific reasoning costs an afternoon to fix now and a term to fix in Year 12.
- How many practice papers should I do?
- Fewer, worked through properly, beats more filed away. A paper you have marked yourself question by question and then gone back over teaches more than three sat and scored.
For official information, see Official syllabuses and past papers from NESA.
Aussie Edu Hub is an independent educational practice platform and is not affiliated with NESA or any state education authority. Practice papers are not official examination materials.