SACE Year 12 psychology exam abandoned after technical failure
Thousands of Year 12 students were left in distress this morning when their electronic psychology exam had to be abandoned about half an hour in because of a tech glitch.
Education
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THOUSANDS of Year 12 students were left in distress when their psychology exam being conducted electronically had to be abandoned because of a technical problem.
The exam, being taken by 2720 students, included a video clip in one of the questions, with that data file pinpointed as the source of the problem.
A St Peter’s Girls School student said “there were some tears” among her classmates as the exam crashed on Wednesday morning.
She battled “an hour and a half of errors (error messages) … going retry and try again”.
“Teachers started running around asking IT for help,” said the student, who did not want to be named. “One of the teachers came in near the end and said it’s cancelled. I was just kind of shocked.”
SACE Board chief executive Martin Westwell apologised for the failure. It was the first electronic exam crash in SA since the format was introduced with one subject in 2018.
Last year, three exams were electronic and this year nine are being run – with nutrition and tourism to proceed today and tomorrow as scheduled.
Three exams this year include video or audio components for the first time.
Prof Westwell said students “preferred to do exams” electronically and the board was convinced it offered better assessment potential. “And that’s why we’re committed to carrying on with the electronic exam program,” he said.
This would include increasing the number of subjects using the format, although no decisions had yet been made.
The psychology exam was worth 30 per cent of students’ final grade. Prof Westwell said it could not be rescheduled because students had seen the questions and they had focused for this point in time. Instead, a “derived” score would be created from the teacher’s prediction of how the student would perform – lodged two weeks earlier – and a statistical process applied by the SACE Board which considered all of the earlier work.
The method had been shown to be accurate to within one grade increment – for example, a B+ instead of a B – 97 per cent of the time.
Errors mostly resulted in a more favourable result for the student, Prof Westwell said.
Prof Westwell said innovation always created risk despite extensive testing and preparation. “We were able to take that risk because we are confident we have a robust and fair process in place in the event something goes wrong,” he said.
SA Secondary Principals Association president Peter Mader said the “failsafe” of derived scores was precisely for “a situation like the one that’s arisen”.
He said it was better than rescheduling the exam, especially in the COVID-19-affected year Year 12s have endured.
“I think these kids have been through enough,” he said.
Education Minister John Gardner said the experience for students was “unacceptable” and they would be “rightly upset”.
“I am disappointed in this technical failure, as are we all, and I have conveyed that disappointment to the SACE Board, who I know feel keenly for these students,” he said.
Opposition Education spokesman Blair Boyer said the failure was distressing for students.
Mr Boyer was particularly concerned about students who may have had a difficult year because of COVID-19 or other factors and had been working hard to boost their final result with a good exam score.
“For some students the derived result might work out well but for those students who didn’t perform so well in the other 70 per cent of their assessment, they’ve lost the opportunity to have that score raised,” he said.
