Experts Consulted After Discovery of Numerous Errors in Student Exams

After multiple errors were found in last year’s VCE exams, some students were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Subject experts will be brought in to draft Victoria’s VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) exams after multiple mistakes by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) in last year’s final Year 12 tests.

Multiple typographical errors appeared in general maths and chemistry exams in 2023, and six students received the wrong Chinese language exam.

After initially seeking to have affected students sign non-disclosure agreements, the VCCA publicly admitted the errors, issued an apology for the distress caused, and stressed the students’ marks would not be impacted.

An independent review by former NSW Education Standards Authority head, Dr. John Bennett, recommended more input from experts earlier in the design process.

Minister Briefed

Victorian Minister of Education Ben Carroll, who has not given the VCAA board a pay rise this year, confirmed he had been briefed by Dr. Bennett about his concerns.

“One of the major ones was making sure we do bring in experts earlier, including mathematicians and experts from the university sector to help with the writing of the exams,” Mr.Carroll said.

“We are going to see a lot more academic rigour and integrity as part of the exam-writing process,” Mr. Carroll said.

“We need to bring more people into the tent that are experts in the field, to really help us with the writing of the exam and then go through a more rigorous process to ensure the exam questions are 100 percent watertight correct.”

Noting that there had also been errors in the 2022 exam paper, the minister said: “We have to do better. A message is being sent from me as minister that it is unacceptable what these Year 12s went through … and we need to improve our standards at the VCAA.”

Errors Happening For Years, Experts Claim

But a group of Monash University mathematicians last year claimed mistakes had been appearing on VCE exam papers for almost 20 years.

They wrote an open letter that was highly critical of the VCAA, and called for an urgent overhaul of VCE exams, citing as an example what they said were five errors in maths questions, each of which “exhibit[ed] some fundamental misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the underlying mathematics.”

But, while a review of the 2022 exam by Deloitte found there was “room for improvement” in the language used, it concluded there were no “major mathematical errors” in any of the questions.

Mr Carroll said the final report would be reviewed by the government in March and vowed to publicly release its findings.

The man who was chief executive of the VCAA when the errors were made, Stephen Gniel has since been appointed acting chief of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority.

AAP contributed to this report.