"It seems incredibly cruel," said Johanna Deutsch, of the length of time between the first and last exams. She was there to celebrate with students sitting Modern Hebrew Continuers. "But I'm sure they thought it was more cruel than we did."

After almost a month, the final exams of high school came to an end at 5pm yesterday. Only 38 students sat for Hebrew, a shadow of the 68,000 students whose exams have finished in dribs and drabs since late October.

"It feels like a relief, an absolute relief," Nicole Gluckman, who sat the final exam, said. "It's a bit surreal now. In my head, I'm thinking I have to go back home and study. But it will eventually sink in that I don't have more exams."

Cars turned up with vodka and Red Bull. Perhaps more of both than is usually on the steps of the synagogue. Champagne, too. The Greenwood Hotel at North Sydney was set for good business last night.

"I'm going to celebrate," Ms Gluckman said. "I'm going to get out of this isolation chamber and actually speak to people." There were 110 separate exams in this year's HSC - 13 million printed question pages, 1.75 million answer booklets, a team of more than 30 people working for six weeks to pack each school's box of resources.

It will be 6am on December 17 before students know how any of that went, when mobile phones start beeping with results and the internet is clogged with school leavers finding out what it was all for. But all of that was a long way away yesterday.

"I knew from the start that the two weeks from the end of October to the middle of November would be the hardest two weeks of the year. It's just so hard to study when your friends are out at the beach," said Josh Garber, who was among the last to finish. "I'm going to hit the pub and then Kings Cross or something."