Compromised question in the VCE Economics exam won’t count toward students marks

A VCE exam will be marked out of 79 not 80 because a question that was rewritten after the leak scandal was so poorly worded it was “invalidated”.

A compromised question in the VCE Economics exam is not expected to be counted, triggering the prospect that answers in many more exams may also not be marked.

The 3600 students who sat the 2024 Economics exam were left confused by the first multiple choice question, with students calling it “weird ass” and “not on the study guide”.

The question had to be rewritten after the original was mistakenly leaked by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, along with questions from at least 55 other exams, as first revealed by the Herald Sun.

But it was badly written and the exam is now expected to be marked out of 79, not 80.

It is possible answers in multiple VCE exams will not be counted. Picture: iStock

It comes as VCAA officials and outside experts determine how to treat other compromised exams, with several questions likely to be struck out and others given full marks.

Students’ individual results will also be analysed to assess who has been advantaged and disadvantaged by the widespread accessing of the leaked questions.

A VCE insider said similar errors had plagued Economics exams in recent years, with other questions struck out for being wrong, poorly written or not on the study design.

For example, the VCAA Economics examiners’ report from 2020 notes that question 14 of the multiple choice questions was “invalidated” although no ­detail is given as to why.

Several questions are likely to be struck out and others given full marks.

And in the 2018 Economics exam, two answers were accepted for question 11 in the multiple choice section because of the poor design of the question.

In yet another blunder, the Herald Sun can reveal the 2024 exam for Algorithmics was lifted word for word from a 2018 commercial practice exam that was widely available.

Algorithmics is the most prestigious VCE subject and the only one earning students credit for courses at Monash University.

It is seen as one of the most challenging and is scaled up by as much as eight marks.

Although the 2018 exam had more context, both case studies were about two people organising the painting of a picket fence, leading one teacher to call the reuse of the seven-mark question “lazy”.

A student who spotted the double-up said they were “quite certain that students would have gone through many prior papers, since it is a high-scaling subject”.

A question in this year's VCE Algorithmics exam.

The 2018 exam also had a question about the painting of a picket fence.

The VCAA said it is investigating the issue.

It’s not the first time students have found similarities between official VCAA exams and practice exams, with a 2023 Maths Methods exam reusing a case study on bouncy balls from its 2009 paper.

Opposition Education spokeswoman Jess Wilson said that “only an Ombudsman’s investigation will get to the bottom of what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to avoid similar debacles in the future”.