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2026 HSC English Extension 1 exam: What to learn from last year's mistakes
Hi all, in preparation for the upcoming exam, here's what to learn from last year's mistakes.
Exam: Wednesday 28 October 2026, 1:50 pm to 4:00 pm. All times are NSW local time.
The 2025 exam had two 25-mark tasks: Literary Worlds and the elective response. Half the paper was a discursive response to an unseen extract.
NESA does not publish question averages here. Its feedback points to two main problems: not extending the unseen extract's ideas, and not sustaining an argument about the elective question.
The sections below split those two tasks into the specific things worth fixing.
1. Q1: Extend the extract instead of summarising it
Where students went wrong
Students did not engage consistently with the question and stimulus, or discussed literary worlds without connecting their ideas to the extract.
What they should have done
Choose an idea in the extract and develop it. The 2025 feedback identifies possibilities including metaphor, writing as translation and the relationship between writer and reader. Ask what that idea implies about how a literary world is constructed or received. Bring in a relevant textual example to test or complicate it. Retelling the extract in different words does not extend its thinking.
2. Q1: Keep control of the discursive form
Where students went wrong
Some responses lacked sustained control of form and language. A prepared piece could contain strong writing but still fail to respond to this task.
What they should have done
Let the discussion move between the stimulus and your own considered examples. A personal observation can open an idea, but it needs to contribute to the discussion of literary worlds. Make the connections clear enough that the reader can follow the thought. Do not insert an anecdote merely to sound discursive, and do not abandon the stimulus after the opening paragraph.
3. Q1: Discuss the making of meaning
Where students went wrong
Responses needed a more informed understanding of the construction and reception of literary worlds, rather than broad praise of the power of stories.
What they should have done
Explain a specific relationship. For example, a narrator’s limited access to information can make readers assemble a world from partial accounts. The reader’s understanding is therefore shaped by what is withheld as well as what is stated. Support that point with a text you actually know and connect it to the extract’s idea.
4. Q2: Respond to dominant assumptions in your elective
Where students went wrong
Students gave a prepared discussion of their texts without sustaining an argument about how they challenged the assumptions identified by the question.
What they should have done
State the relevant assumption and explain how the text disrupts it. Then examine the form, language or contextual choice that does that work. An unusual narrative structure is not automatically a challenge to an assumption: show what readers are prompted to reconsider. Keep the elective’s ideas and the actual question connected throughout.
5. Q2: Make the related text part of the argument
Where students went wrong
Answers did not always integrate the prescribed and related material into a cohesive response, or gave evidence that did not serve the central argument.
What they should have done
Select a related text that helps you develop or complicate the same claim. Explain what changes when the idea is presented in a different form or context. Avoid a final paragraph that introduces the related text as an afterthought. The comparison should add something to the argument you have already built, supported by precise textual analysis.
Source: NESA 2025 English Extension 1 exam, marking guidelines and feedback.
Use the English Extension 1 hub and past papers and marking guides alongside this.
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