In just 12 months, HSC modern history student Olivia Lee has covered almost 100 years of dictators, wars and the best and worst of humanity, from Rosa Parks to Hitler.

On Tuesday morning, a century of content was condensed even further. Three hours was all she had to demonstrate she could remember all the dates, facts and statistics she’d learnt, alongside 11,131 other students sitting the final modern history exam.

“Modern history is one of those subjects where there’s so much content that you’re only really tested on a very small proportion of it,” Olivia, 18, said.

Topics she studied covered Nazi Germany, the Russian Revolution, the Vietnam War and the American civil rights movements – all periods which initially appeared entirely separate.

“But you realise that everything’s a bit m

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