By Alex Crowe and Rachel Eddie
The board of Victoria’s curriculum authority has been dismissed after a review of the 2024 VCE scandal that advantaged thousands of students over their peers found sustained failures by the agency.
The report published on Tuesday found sample cover pages containing real exam questions were viewed online about 6000 times before tens of thousands of students sat their final exams last year. The exam material was accidentally published by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA).
Education Minister Ben Carroll ordered the review after questions on 65 VCE exams were leaked.Credit: Chris Hopkins
Some students saved the sample cover pages to their hard drives, internet forum activity revealed, but the review could not determine how many students had done so.
The Victorian government has accepted all eight recommendations of the report, including installing a new VCAA board. An interim board has been appointed, led by Andrew Smith, who will start as chief executive on June 1.
Education Minister Ben Carroll ordered the “root and branch review” after 65 tests – more than half of the 116 VCE subjects – had questions inadvertently leaked on cover sheets.
Responding to Tuesday’s report, Carroll said the board was unprepared for the 2024 exams, which contributed to mistakes in the cover pages’ creation and distribution.
Once the unintentional publication of the cover pages was discovered, the rewriting of exams was not “up to scratch”, Carroll said.
“There was a complete lack of oversight from the board when it comes to VCE examinations,” he said.
Following the fiasco, senior public servant Margaret Crawford was installed as an independent monitor to oversee development of the 2025 exams, and Yehudi Blacher was appointed to prepare a two-phase review into the 2024 bungle.
In the review, Blacher wrote that the VCE scandal, coupled with mishaps in 2022 and 2023, where mistakes were printed and some students were given wrong exams, revealed sustained mismanagement.
“Each of the failures of the past three years has specific explanations as to why they occurred. Taken together, however, they reveal systemic shortfalls in the quality of governance and some parts of the VCAA management.”
The report found a staff member no longer working at the VCAA encouraged the use of an unauthorised, unapproved software tool to create the 2024 cover pages.
Rather than create new files for the cover sheets, which is standard practice, the tool linked to online exams and blanked out the finalised exam material.
The use of the tool, which the report found was in response to time pressure, allowed students to see blanked-out exam material on 65 exams by highlighting the area where text was obscured.
A VCAA exam panel member discovered the exam content could be viewed days after the cover pages were published, and it was taken offline.
One hundred staff members were mobilised to rewrite the disclosed questions within a two-day timeframe, however, the report found some final exam material looked very similar to that which was unintentionally revealed.
In the ensuing chaos, which included reprinting and mailing out more than 300,000 exams while the exam period was underway, 24 students received an incorrect exam paper.
Blacher’s report found the VCAA wrongly concluded that it was highly unlikely that students had discovered the material, and the situation was contained once the material was taken down.
It was only discovered through a cyber review that some sample cover pages had not been identified as containing exam material, so students had access throughout the exam period.
“More significantly, it was not understood that internet archiving tools would capture the information regardless of it being removed from the website,” he said.
“This is, however, commonly understood by a technologically literate generation of students.”
Blacher said frequent VCAA management changes over the past five years – with six acting and substantive CEOs and nine executive directors – had contributed to low employee morale and organisational instability.
A new senior executive director position will be created with designated accountability for end-to-end examination development, as part of his recommendations.
Opposition Leader Brad Battin said the government should have taken tougher action immediately rather than waiting for the review to come back months later.
“How can the government guarantee that they’re going to fix the system between now and the end of the year?” he said.
Cover pages will not be used in this year’s exam, in line with the report’s recommendations.
From 2026, the VCAA will also create back-up exams for use in a future mishap, in line with practice in other jurisdictions.
Opposition education spokeswoman Jess Wilson criticised the independence and scope of the review, saying it contained nothing to ensure the exam blunders of the past three years didn’t occur again.
The review’s second stage will include a review of the board’s structure, operations, culture and capability. A second report will investigate whether the VCAA can adequately perform its duties in its current form.