Students studying Hamlet were thrown a curve ball in Tuesday's HSC advanced English exam, according to year 12 student Laura McCabe.
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"It was a surprise because they gave us an extract to analyse and I had never analysed that scene before," she said.
Luckily, the St Joseph's Catholic High School student worked out where the scene appeared and finished her essay.
Like most teenagers, Laura doesn't always agree that Shakespeare is a relevant text.
"I argued in my essay that it endured time as a text but it can be hard to understand. I read a few modern versions so I could get my head around it," she said.
Laura didn't try to guess which questions would appear, instead writing an essay that would work across a variety of questions.
"I just tried to get a really generic answer and then practised by doing all past papers I could get my hands on," she said.
The HSC candidate also studied classics including The Great Gatsby and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets.
She advised future HSC students to start early by treating year 11 as a practice year.
"There's no time in year 12 to figure out what way of studying works best, you should get it all sorted so you can just nail year 12," she said.