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High school students from Belmore to Baghdad began their HSC exams on Monday, with the largest cohort in history taking on the first English exam.
At 10:30 am 70,000 students, in 13 locations around the world, put pen to paper, ready to dump as much knowledge onto the page as they could cram into their heads.
Sweaty palms grew sweatier as the stifling heat forced the doors of Wyndham College in Sydney's west to be opened.
Inside the school hall a sick bucket maintained a vigil as students toiled with Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Nerves would span the globe for this year's exams, with several hundred students sitting the tests overseas.
More than 13,000 kilometres from Wyndham College, a consular official minded an expatriate teen writing in Baghdad, while in Barcelona, as in the Sydney CBD, students battled to get creative with the idea of, "discovery", the first time the theme has been used for the HSC English exam.
This year's essay asked students to look at the process of discovery through "uncovering what is hidden and reconsidering what is known".
While the theme may have changed, tactics have not.
Students at Wyndham prepared by memorising responses and then moulding them to questions.
"Teachers lie when they say you can't memorise an English essay," said 17-year-old Tanya Arora. "Believe me, you can."
The Wyndham College student said like many of her classmates that she was confident about the test and was feeling "one step closer to freedom".
Harrison Bleakley, 17, said his nerves had faded once he realised he was going to be able to adapt his pre-prepared responses to the questions.
"A lot of the hype around the HSC itself gets you a bit nervous, but once I got in there and saw the questions I forgot about it," he said.
On first glance, teachers were happy with the first exam of the HSC season too. The questions were suitably vague for a first-year theme, they said.
"All in all it was a really fair paper," said a former HSC marker and senior teacher at Wyndham, who cannot be named because he is not an authorised spokesman for the department.
The international push to this year's HSC comes as up to 15 NSW private schools offer the International Baccalaureate as an alternative to the HSC.
But the President of the Board of Studies, Tom Alegounarias, denied there was any threat to the dominance of the state's 48-year-old testing system.
"To be frank, the International Baccalaureate is a couple of hundred students. There are different horses for different courses. We are 75,000 students, it really isn't a question of comparison."
He added that the great challenge for the HSC's future was that it meets the demands of an increasingly global student base.
"Australia and Sydney in particular are international places. It has to be an international credential."
"It's very important that those universities, Harvard and Oxford, regard [the HSC], and we are pleased to say that they do."
The HSC exams continue on Tuesday with paper two of the English exam.
