Year 12 students are not the only ones flummoxed by questions on the HSC English exam. Yesterday’s Guardian news report, These HSC exam questions stumped some NSW students: How would you fare?, presents a selection of troubling excerpts from the recent exam paper. Let’s take a look at the following two exam questions, which were reported in the Guardian alongside the texts to which they refer:

• How does Dahl use personal experience to show the reader the importance of kindness?
• Analyse Langbroek’s representation of the emotional impact of new places.

To my judgement, these are both poorly-framed questions due to their ambiguity. Multiple answers are possible depending on what assumptions you make.

That ‘how’ in the first question is frustratingly vague. Do the examiners mean ‘What literary techniques does Dahl use in reporting her personal experience in order to show the reader the importance of kindness?’ Or do they mean ‘How does Dahl integrate personal experience into her argument to show the reader the importance of kindness?’ Or a third, admittedly less probable, option: perhaps the ‘how’ is being used to inquire about quality (as in ‘how are you?’—‘I’m well’) in which case the examiners might mean to ask: ‘How effective is Dahl in using personal experience to show the reader the importance of kindness?’ 

The second question is equally underspecified. We know that analysis calls for an identification of main ideas, and an examination of their relationship and importance. But ‘Analyse Langbroek’s representation of the emotional impact of new places’ could mean at least two very different things. It could mean ‘Analyse the techniques Langbroek uses to represent the emotional impact of new places’. Or it could mean ‘Analyse the argument, represented in Langbroek’s text, regarding the emotional impact of new places.’ 

How are students to respond when they can’t fathom what is being asked of them? Have the exam writers produced ambiguous questions on purpose, and if so, to what end? (Despite Eva Gold’s exhortation on behalf of the English Teachers Association of NSW that “students need to take time to analyse the question itself“, surely students are not expected to undertake the kind of detailed and time-consuming interrogation-of-the-question that I’ve just done.)

And if the questions were not ambiguous by design, they could only be so by neglect. This would be unforgivably shoddy, especially considering that the exam-writers are experts in English language and literature. Either way, it’s not fair to students.

In each of the two exam questions we’ve looked at, the radically different tasks of literary analysis and argument analysis seem to have been unceremoniously jammed together as though they were one and the same. Of course it’s possible that there were additional instructions or contextual cues, not reported in the Guardian, that may have served to disambiguate the questions. But if examiners intended for students to tackle both the literary analysis and argument analysis tasks, this should have been made explicit, and students should have had double the time to respond.

None of this is to say that ambiguity should be avoided in all of our communications. Ambiguity is useful in certain circumstances, whether as an instrument of tact, a tool for diplomacy, or a poetic device. And no doubt there are occasions in our lives where uncertainty, indeterminacy, and literary suggestiveness have their place. But in the stressful and high-stakes context of final examinations, students are entitled to clear questions, and this is no less the case with respect to questions about meaning and interpretation than with respect to questions about facts.

As I’ve argued in my previous critiques of high school English assessments (How to think about a Persuasive Writing task and NAPLAN Persuasive Writing test subverts critical thinking), vague or otherwise ill-posed questions make it extraordinarily difficult for students, time-constrained as they are in exam conditions, to answer well. But the problem is more serious than that. Poorly-framed questions make it impossible for even the most well-prepared student to know what would constitute a high-quality response: a response that, in relation to the question, is relevant, logical, comprehensive and — yes —unambiguous.

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The Philosophy Club, based in Melbourne, works with students and teachers to develop a culture of critical and creative thinking through collaborative inquiry and dialogue.