If your child starts year 12 exams today, don’t do what I did

October 13, 2026 — 2:00am

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It’s October and the jacaranda trees in my street are in bud. This can only mean one thing – it’s 12 years since my firstborn child did her final school exams – and I temporarily lost my mind.

My daughter was studious and ambitious and wanted to do well. But somewhere along the way, she became anxious, which made me anxious, causing me to behave like an idiot, making everything much worse. This story has a happy ending, and contains one life-changing event, but if your child is doing the HSC, the VCE or the IB this year, please consider this as a tale of what not to do.

In those days, I was suffering under the delusion that this result mattered – that a random figure was somehow important. Now I can see that assigning an arbitrary figure to a teenager – they of the unformed frontal lobe – based on a series of three-hour exams on topics they will probably never look at again, is often meaningless. For someone who will have at least three or four careers in different sectors over the course of a lifetime, being defined by one number seems insane. And anyone who even thinks about their score and tells people about it – I’m looking at you, Senator Dave Sharma –........

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