Dr Meg Brayshaw, John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, told EducationHQ that social media has opened up unprecedented avenues for students to contact writers, and that those unhappy with their performance on the English exam might not distinguish the difference between venting with family and friends about a difficult question and taking their grievance to the writer directly.

Brayshaw notes there have been two “particularly egregious” examples of this playing out in recent years.

“The first big one was Ellen van Neerven [an Indigenous writer and poet]. Her poem Mango was included in the HSC (exam) and she received a lot of vitriol, some of which was explicitly racist,” Brayshaw explains.

“Students weren’t academically penalised for that, but I think some of the complaints were referred to the police.”

The exam question, worth two marks, asked students to “explain how the poet conveys the delight of discovery”.

It prompted a torrent of abuse directed at van Neerven, including some students who contacted the award-winning writer directly on Facebook.

“We were asked to analyse your mango f*#ked poem – and I’m asking what the f*#k was the point of your mango bulls*#t,” one message purportedly sent to van Neervan and subsequently posted on an HSC discussion group read.

“In all honesty there wasn’t much to analyse cos it reads like a 4-year-old wrote it,” another said.

At the time, the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) said that authors whose work appear in the exams were not notified in advance “due to security and confidentiality requirements”.

“I am appalled by the abuse of the author,” David de Carvalho, NESA CEO at the time, said over the incident. 

Brayshaw highlights another example from 2021.

“American-Vietnamese writer Ocean Vuong had a section from his novel [featured in the English exam], and received a lot of comments – less vitriolic than (those directed at) van Neerven, but certainly some that crossed the line to being a little bit inappropriate.”

The ethics around engaging with literary works and writers should be covered with students well ahead of the exam period, Brayshaw says.

The way in which literary texts are presented in exam paper 1 is at the crux of this problem, the expert says.

“It’s essentially framed as, to some degree, a utilitarian transaction.

“The student reads this writer’s work and is supposed to extract meaning from it in order to garner marks, and I think that fuels a way of thinking about the text and its creators in that kind of economy.”

Brayshaw explains that while nothing excuses online abuse, the fact that students are being positioned to extract meaning from these texts in reward for marks sets up an ‘economy of transaction’ between themselves and the writer.

The fact that these works have diverse meanings and come from their own context can be lost on students, she suggests.

“So, there’s a kind of fundamental issue with how that part of the exam paper presents literary texts and requires students to engage with literature that I think goes against what literary studies is and could be – and perhaps there needs to be more thinking around that on a philosophical level,” Brayshaw urges.

The ethics around engaging with literary works and writers really does need to be covered with students well ahead of the exam period, she adds.

“We live in a moment of cultural immediacy, where students can read something and then jump online and contact the author in a lot of cases.

“And thinking about the ethics of that engagement and what it means to think about a writer as both someone who puts meaning on a page but also as a real person – having those conversations in class, and to think about that politics of reception and engagement, and ask students to think about it, too, is potentially another strategy…”

It’s unclear if NESA now notify writers that their work will be appearing in an HSC exam, Brayshaw says, and it’s tricky given the content security considerations involved.

However, the authority does have a duty of care here, she says.

“Even if on the day writers are told that their work is going to appear and have some space to prepare, they wouldn’t necessarily have to know what text it’s coming from or what part of their work is being shared, but just this awareness that they might appear in this exam and that there are supports available [could be a practice in place].”

In Ocean Vuong’s case, the writer wasn’t even aware of what the HSC was before the online commentary hit, the expert flags.

“And suddenly he had all these people contacting him about that, so it is really tricky, and again I think that feeds back into this idea of a kind of utilitarian transaction.”

Brayshaw says she’d like to see the sample text part of the English exam re-configured “in a way that would allow students to have a more organic, holistic engagement with literary text”.

“But I realise that’s utopian,” she admits. 

NSW students sat this year’s HSC English exam yesterday, answering five short-answer questions based on unseen texts plus a long-format essay question on a prescribed text.

The unseen texts included extracts from Australian author Andrew Pippos and Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults.

Students who took to social media post-exam took issue with the way in which the paper was stapled, Guardian Australia reports, with one lamenting it “five mins [sic] to turn a single page” on TikTok.

Others objected to the choice of essay prompt, which many students had been hoping to answer on “anomalies, inconsistencies and paradoxes”, the publisher says.

Paul Martin, NESA chief executive, told reporters that this year’s HSC cohort “began Year 7 wearing masks in the pandemic”.