Could you pass your HSC exam again? How to learn from your past to forge your future

If there’s one recurring nightmare we might have, it’s being back at school and under pressure to perform for exams again. We may or may not be wearing our clothes, and our teeth might be falling out as we fall off a cliff. But I digress.

For me, 2024 marks twenty years since I did my VCE (HSC) exams and graduated from high school. Looking back, perhaps apart from some fundamentals, so much has changed.

It’s been about ten years since I completed a master’s degree in communication and media studies – and thanks to emerging technology and artificial intelligence, much of my coursework has probably been rendered obsolete. Back then, YouTube was considered “new media.” Now, it’s everywhere.

Hearing the story of Chris Seville, director, and physiotherapist of Healthy Bodies Physiotherapy in Melbourne’s Bayside suburb of Cheltenham, it gave me pause for thought. He and his wife, an engineer by trade, often re-take the VCE physics exam.

That’s right – they’ll sit down for three hours and answer complicated questions in silence.

But… why?

“It was basically to see if my knowledge was still sharp around that subject,” he says, sipping a coffee. We’re sitting in an aeronautical-themed café, aircraft bits and pieces hung up as decorations. We’re sharing a casual chat, one more stop in a typically busy day for Chris.

“I’ve got a six-year-old now who’s coming through and we’re teaching him some phonics and some basic maths and trying to see where we can get his knowledge to. I’m excited about where his learning is going to go in the next few years. And I feel like he at six is in a better place than where I was at six.

“My thoughts on what’s going to happen for him, especially because systems will become so efficient, is that what we now consider Year 12 knowledge will be Year 10 knowledge. That’s when you know things have really changed.”

Apart from cutting edge discoveries such as the Higgs boson, the fundamentals of physics likely haven’t changed since he took the real exam in 2002. Sports science and physiotherapy on the other hand, definitely has.

Chris’ career and thirst for knowledge has taken him to the peak of his profession. Since 2008, he’s worked in private practice, published academic articles, and taught anatomy at Monash University from 2010 to 2014. His childhood dream came true when he became Collingwood Football Club’s physiotherapist and strength program coordinator in 2011, finishing in 2017 to focus on Healthy Bodies. He also is a three-time Australian powerlifting champion, Oceania champion, and currently holds the under 83kg Australian squat record at a massive 290kg: pun absolutely intended.

In a medical setting, knowing your stuff is a necessity of the job. Having done exams from both sides of the desk, he agrees that physiotherapy has advanced so much over two decades – and continuous development is the one thing that won’t ever change.

“I think as a profession, I think what new grads are outputting now compared to new grads 15, 20 years ago, the level of physio is better than what it was,” he says. “I think in 15- and 20-years’ time from now, again, it’ll be better again. I think it will. I would say we’re a pretty evolving profession and field, whereas other areas maybe there’s less opportunity for advancement than in our field. But particularly with the body, we don’t have all the answers. There’s lots of different conditions that we don’t understand the best practises around how to intervene. And that’s not just physio, that’s medicine across the board. It will always be an ever-evolving space.”

Development as a process of excellence

Though it may be second nature to clinicians, but Chris and his team have created a development process which ensures they’re at the top of their trade. That excellence is assured by how the business functions.

“We run [personal development] every week for our team,” he says. “With our junior team that looks like me or one of my colleagues, one of the more senior colleagues meeting with the team, meeting with that junior team member every week, one-on-one. Most of that’s talking through their tricky cases and that sort of thing. We ask the team what they’ve learned, perhaps at uni or in journals, and we share that among us all. It’s changing all the time, and we have to make sure that we’re levelling up so we’re aligning with what’s best practice. I think that’s something physios do pretty well.”

Though we may not think the world has moved on since we took our high school exams, there’s more chance it has than it hasn’t. As soloists, it really is incumbent on us to find out what is best practice and realise that some of our fundamental school-learning may be somewhat out of date. That way we can better serve our customers, cater to emerging markets, and use our agility to our advantage.

Cutting together short videos on a PC was considered Year 12 knowledge in media studies. That’s possibly something a Year 7 could do, thanks to smartphones and intuitive apps. With that in mind, we need to combine our ready experience with what may lie just over the horizon.

So: do we have to take our respective HSC exams again to get there? I’ll leave that up to you to decide!

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