By Emily Kowal and Frances Howe
She’d been waiting for this moment for 21 months, but the last hour was the most agonising. All day on Friday, 11-year-old Sriaradhya Epari thought: “Will I make my parents proud? Will I get into my dream school?”
About 4pm, that moment came as Sriaradhya arrived home from school. She was one of 17,559 students fighting for a spot at one of the state’s selective high schools. Just 4227 were offered a position.
When she walked through the door, her heart sank. Her dad’s expression was “neutral”.
“I thought I didn’t get in,” she said. “I was crying a bit in the bathroom. But it turns out the results hadn’t actually come out yet, so I thought maybe I actually have a chance.”
Like many parents and students on Friday, Sriaradhya’s agonising wait was prolonged after the website hosting the results crashed. It was a last-minute glitch in an exam year that has been marred by controversy.
When Sriaradhya’s screen finally loaded, her heart raced. She’d done it. She’d been accepted into Girraween High School.
“I just really want to make my parents proud, to make a mark in my parents’ history,” she said.
Across NSW, anxious parents and students waited at their computers.
Hon Yap logged on at 3pm hoping to see if his daughter Rochelle had an offer from Caringbah High, but an hour later was still waiting to access the system.
“Long story short, it keeps crashing out,” he said. “In the last five minutes, we’re seeing the same message of loading.”
When the Herald contacted the Department of Education to inquire about the crash, a spokesperson said they were unaware of any issues. They later said the site was “working but was just slow”.
The high-stakes test was held online and at mega-centres for the first time and was marred by controversy. This decision quickly led to chaos after technical glitches and “significant failures” put children at risk and forced the riot squad to be deployed to control frantic crowds, a formal inquiry found.
Children at mega-centres were given the chance to take the test again, and the higher of their exam results was taken, while other students had their exam postponed, giving them more study time, a point of contention among parents.
Sriaradhya’s father, Srikant Epari, was one of the many parents upset by the decision to give some students a second attempt.
“As a parent, to see through the effort that my child has put in for the exam and the sacrifice that we as parents made for this event is unmeasurable,” he said. “We want to ensure that the decision made is fair with every aspect considered.”
He is relieved it all worked out.
Riot police were called to the selective schools test at Canterbury Park Racecourse in May.
Like many parents, Epari spent thousands of dollars on coaching and private tutors, sacrificing holidays and after-school activities for rigorous preparation. “I am very emotional. I wasn’t expecting this, but she made it,” he said.
An independent review into the fairness and integrity of the tests by Professor Jim Tognolini, the head of the Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment at Sydney University, found that children who took the test twice, on average, scored worse on their second attempt.
It found that significant disruptions at the three major centres likely had “varying levels of impact on students’ scores”, but it would have been “difficult, if not impossible” to accommodate these disruptions using “existing protocols”.
It was decided the “fairest solution to the problem” was to give students caught up in the disruptions a chance to resit the exam, with the better of their two scores being used.
While about 38 (3 per cent) of the 1269 students who sat two versions of the test may have “scored high enough on the resit to suggest they may have benefited from the second administration”, most students “performed within measurement expectations”, or worse.
Australian Tutoring Association chief executive Mohan Dhall said that would be little consolation to parents whose children did not make it through.
“There’ll be a lot of angry parents on various Facebook forums, and they will whip themselves up into a frenzy. But the reality is not going to make any difference,” he said.
“For parents who miss out, a proportion of them are going to feel as though there was never any justice done, and will always feel aggrieved and that the process somehow undermined their best intentions.”
Dhall said the debacle proved that “it’s time for the whole selective school system to be replaced with selective classes in every school”.
Matthew Sussman’s 11-year-old daughter’s test was postponed, and he said: “The way that this test is run does not seem like a fair assessment of a child’s academic potential.
“The test puts pressure on families, it puts pressure on children and it is not a fair way of measuring potential.
“I now understand why some parents hire tutors from a young age, or put their children into coaching colleges or, as one of my daughter’s peers did, put their child in a private school for two years to get an advantage and then return the child to public school the year of the test.”
“These are insane things to be doing in order to achieve highly on a standardised test. I think the test very much benefits people who have the means and the foresight and the resources to get their kids into coaching programs.”
Manha Sarker was one of thousands of students taking the 2025 selective schools test.Credit: Louie Douvis
For 12-year-old Manha Sarker, who had spent more than a year studying for the selective schools test with three different kinds of coaching, the anxiety welled as she thought of those allowed to re-sit their exams.
“I thought it was really unfair, they had an advantage,” she said. Adding to the frustrating experience was being forced to wait almost two hours for the results to load on her mother’s laptop.
“I was actually just sitting here for one hour thinking, what am I gonna get, am I going to fail,” she said.
Instead, Manha got a reserve spot for her top choice, Sydney Girls, and a place at her second preference, Hurlstone Agricultural High.
“I was relieved. I was actually happy I felt like crying but I didn’t cry,” she said.
Also relieved is Riffat Khan, Manha’s mother, who, frustrated by process, said that although she was happy for her daughter, she’d felt let down by the department.
“It was probably expected that a lot of parents would be there at 3pm so they should have managed that from beforehand, this amount of traffic would have been expected, and after the failure at the exam... I think they let us down completely,” she said.
Additional reporting by Christopher Harris.
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