To say students had a challenging time in 2020 is an understatement, but data has been crunched to see if COVID stress impacted students' HSC results.

While the numbers of distinguished achievers, those who achieved one or more band 6 marks, were down from the year before across the board, Calrossy managed to come out of the pandemic year with more rankings and higher results than they received in 2019. Calrossy came away with 50 distinguished achievers and three state rankings out of 94 students who sat the exams. Principal David Smith was proud there wasn't a dip in results from last year, however was pleased and surprised to see the great work spread across the cohort and not concentrated in a handful of students.

"For us I think what was good was the results overall were similar to last year and also spread around more students," he said.