The Victorian premier says people will be frustrated and disappointed that thousands of VCE students were given access to de facto cheat sheets that reportedly contained almost identical questions to those used in their final exams.
The cheat sheets, first reported by the Herald Sun, were for eight subjects including business management, specialist maths and legal studies. Those exams have already been sat.
Published by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) online, when blank sections of the cover pages were pasted into a Word document, it revealed a series of questions and answers.
Speaking on 3AW Radio Melbourne on Thursday, the VCAA’s chief executive officer, Kylie White, said the material was “inadvertently included in the sample cover sheets”.
She said the issue was discovered in October before the first written exam commenced and the documents were pulled from the internet.
“As a result, the authority reviewed all the exams to ensure that the example material and the exam questions were different,” White said.
White told ABC Radio Melbourne while there were “similarities” between the cheat sheet questions and the final exams.
“There are similarities, but they’re not the same questions,” she said.
“The VCE examinations haven’t been compromised and all students can be very confident about completing their exams.”
However, the cheat sheets were distributed online, and the Herald Sun report suggests almost identical content was used on some exams.
The deputy premier and education minister, Ben Carroll, said he had “hard questions” for VCAA.
“No student will be sitting an examination that will be a copy of the sample question that some of the students discovered,” Carroll said.
“There has been human error here. It’s still not acceptable and I will get to the bottom of this.”
Jacinta Allan said the incident was incredibly “disappointing” for students, their parents and teachers.
“Anyone who knows a year 12 or a VCE student, they might have one in their family, they just know how hard those young people work … to get to this point of the school year to sit their exams,” she told reporters on Thursday.
“This is really frustrating for those parents and teachers and students and young people, and that is why the deputy premier is getting advice this morning and will provide further information off the back of that advice.”
It comes after the government was forced to conduct a review into errors in last year’s exams, which included five mistakes in maths tests and one in chemistry.
Thousands of students were given bonus marks for the errors in specialist and general maths papers, while six Chinese language students at two schools were given the wrong exam papers.
The review, conducted by Dr John Bennett, recommended implementing more suitably qualified academics on maths exam developments panels and stronger examination review processes.
In October, Carroll said VCAA had implemented or was on track to implement “every single one of the recommendations made by the independent review”.
The opposition’s spokesperson for education, Jess Wilson, said it was “absolutely staggering” VCE exams had again been compromised.
“Students have been able to download these exam papers, and those students that have done so have an unfair advantage over those students going into exams who have not been able to do so,” Wilson said.
“The minister said last year that he was going to make sure that this exam period was foolproof, that he was going to make sure that the VCAA was held to account, and these mistakes would not happen again. But here we are today with tens of thousands of Victorian students having had their exams compromised.”
