JENI O’DOWD: The ‘cruel’ university entrance system is in dire need of a drastic overhaul

Years ago, while trick-or-treating with my daughters, we walked up to a house with a sign taped to the front door: “DO NOT KNOCK! Son studying for HSC exams, go away!”

We laughed all the way to the next house. Surely it was an overreaction on a fun night for little kids?

I’m not laughing now. This month one of those little girls is sitting the HSC, and I’ve come to a conclusion I won’t budge from. The way we decide who goes to university is just cruel, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

One day my daughter had two papers back-to-back. One ran for three hours and asked her to write two lengthy essays by hand, on almost no sleep. Like her friends, she has barely relaxed in months.

And she’s not unusual. Every parent I speak to tells me the same thing. Their child has become unrecognisable.

The HSC began in 1967 with 18,000 students. This year it’s more than 80,000, sitting 123 exams over four weeks. The numbers have grown. The method mostly hasn’t. A teenager, a desk, a pen, a clock on the wall and, apparently, the rest of their life hanging off the result.

Even NSW Premier Chris Minns admits he still has nightmares about it. If the Premier is still sweating over his, imagine what it’s doing to the kids sitting it now.

And here’s what makes it worse. The universities don’t even need it.

In NSW, the University of Wollongong handed out a record 9457 early offers for 2027, giving students a place before they’ve sat a single exam.

Last year the Universities Admissions Centre released more than 15,900 early offers through its Schools Recommendation Scheme, based on things like Year 11 results and school ratings.

Year 11. The year that was meant to be a practice run.

So if Year 11 marks are good enough to get thousands of kids into university, why are we putting everyone else through this?

Here’s the irony. The students aiming highest are the ones who can’t escape it. Sydney Uni has scrapped its early offer scheme, and UNSW largely reserves early offers for students from under-represented schools and suburbs.

The University of Queensland doesn’t do early offers at all, and the University of Melbourne makes most Year 12 offers only after ATARs come out.

If you want medicine, law or commerce at any of them, you’re still chasing the number.

And the number keeps climbing. UNSW says it turned away thousands of students this year that it would have liked to take. Its minimum ATAR for arts rose from 80 to 83, and commerce jumped to 96.

Both sides of politics own that. The Turnbull government froze funding for undergraduate places in 2017, and after years of patching, Labor has turned it into a hard cap next year.

Enrol over your target and you get no government money for the extra students. Fewer places, higher cut-offs, more pressure on 17-year-olds. It isn’t complicated.

And look at who we’re doing it to. The Raising Children Network, backed by the Federal Government, says the teenage brain is still being remodelled until the mid-20s, and the decision-making part is the last to fully develop.

Yet we dump the biggest pressure of their lives on them, all at once, years before that part of the brain has caught up.

For young Australians aged 15 to 24, suicide is the leading cause of death. In 2020, the deaths of several Year 11 and 12 students in Sydney’s north prompted a wave of concern about student wellbeing.

An exam is rarely the whole story; I know that. But when the stakes are this high, the first thing we should question is a system that piles everything onto a few weeks in a hall.

Look at India, where 2248 suicides were attributed to exam failure in 2022. When the state of Tamil Nadu brought in supplementary exams to give students a second chance, exam-failure suicides fell by 70 per cent.

A second chance. That’s all it took.

Other countries have found other ways too. In America, universities weigh four years of grades, essays and references.

Nobody is asking to dumb anything down. Yes, half the HSC mark comes from assessments during the year, but those marks are then adjusted to match how the school performed in the final exams.

So in the end, a few weeks in October and November still carry most of the weight. The ridiculous thing is thinking a month in an exam hall tells us who’ll make a good doctor.

And most of us already know it. New research out today from comparison site Finder found 63 per cent of working Australians say their high school results didn’t dictate what they’ve gone on to earn.

Even among people earning $150,000 or more, nearly three in five don’t credit their marks for their salary.

Here’s my message to Federal Education Minister Jason Clare. Scrap the hard cap and fund enough university places that a single ATAR point doesn’t decide a child’s future.

Then use the Education Ministers meeting to push every State to give Year 11 and 12 results real weight on their own, and give kids a second sitting so one bad week doesn’t wreck everything.

And stop treating final exams like a sacred relic just because we’ve always done it.

Eminem built his worldwide hit Lose Yourself around the idea of having just one shot. It works brilliantly in a rap battle. It’s a terrible way to choose the next generation of doctors, teachers and engineers.

Halloween is next week. If you see a sign telling you not to knock, give that house a miss. But maybe leave a few lollies on the doorstep for the very stressed-out teenager sitting inside.

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