Thousands of year 12 students have received an apology from Victoria’s education minister after “unacceptable” errors were discovered in questions in a VCE maths exam.
Students completed the second paper of the general maths exam on Monday afternoon, with some noticing a typo in one question and a misplaced number in another.
On Tuesday, the education minister, Ben Carroll, conceded two errors appeared in the final exam despite a “thorough vetting process”.
He said he had spoken to the chief executive of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA), Stephen Gniel, and an investigation would be conducted by into how the mistakes occurred.
“First and foremost, we know how stressful doing any exam is for our year 12s, and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority and myself as the minister unreservedly apologise to the students and their families for what occurred,” Carroll said.
“It is unacceptable, given the checking and the vetting process, that there were two errors.”
Carroll, who is also the state’s deputy premier, said no students would be unfairly affected by the mistakes, which were largely in the formatting of the exam.
He said the first error, which was picked up before the exam, was an extra “of” in a preamble to part D of question 14. Due to the paper’s formatting, the preamble appeared to be part of an earlier question but was in fact the introduction to a new question.
Students were told to cross out the extra “of” to avoid confusion.
The second error was another typo in part D of question nine, related to a matrix, which incorrectly included two 1s in a column. The mistake was discovered after the exam ended.
“One error was picked up before the mathematics exam was undertaken but it was deemed too late to do the reprinting of that exam,” Carroll said.
“Then there was a second error that occurred in a matrix that’s part of the exam. Students were instructed on the day to very clearly amend their sheet on the day of the examination but the second error wasn’t picked up.
“I want to reassure students and their families that they will not be impacted by this error. It will have no bearing on their marks.”
The mistakes came less than a year after Monash University’s Prof Burkard Polster and Dr Marty Ross wrote a critique of the VCE exams. They said they had identified “major mathematical errors” in past exams, including five in the 2022 specialist and mathematical methods papers.
“Every specialist mathematics and mathematical methods exam that we have seen is marred by at least minor mathematical problems, and most exams contains at least one major error,” they wrote.
An online maths educator, known as MaffsGuru, wrote on social media that Monday’s exam was “different from other years” and “much harder” than the previous general maths paper completed by students on Friday.
“I think question 13 was written by the devil himself,” he wrote. “Other parts were just time-consuming. It was different from other years. Not helped by the mistake in the matrix question!”
MaffsGuru said the second error was a “much bigger mistake” than the inclusion of an extra “of”.
“This isn’t right!” he posted.
Students across Victoria were left reeling after completing the exam, taking to social media to complain about its difficulty.
Carroll said the errors on the general maths paper were believed to be an isolated incident, with no other exams containing mistakes.
He said the government would “strengthen the integrity of the process and get to the bottom of how this occurred, given it did go through a thorough vetting process”.
Exams will continue in Victoria until 15 November.
