Design change believed to be behind VCE exam scandal

A change to the design of VCE exams is believed to be behind one of the biggest education bungles to rock the state, with every single exam on the 2024 schedule now caught up in the scandal.

• VCE Business students demand apology from VCAA

A change to the design of VCE exams to make them more readable may be behind one of the biggest education bungles to rock the state.

Insiders have claimed the pressure to get the new covers out to schools well before the exams could have led to a “processing error” which meant questions were hidden in plain sight.

A VCE co-ordinator on Friday told the Herald Sun the cover sheet guides – which contained the questions – were reissued because the font had to be changed from Times New Roman to Arial.

The change was due to a review of exam fonts and layouts last year found the serif typeface used on exam covers was less “accessible” than sans-serif. It comes as the Herald Sun can reveal every single exam in the 2024 VCE schedule is now believed to have been caught up in the scandal.

As calls mounted for the resignation of Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority CEO Kylie White, seven new subjects have been found to have cover sheets with hidden questions.

They are Maths Methods 1 and 2, Environmental Science, Geography and Product Design, which had a case study worth almost half of the exam’s entire marks accessible to students before the exam.

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Previously revealed by the Herald Sun:

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Global Politics and Software Development, which students completed on Friday, were also last night found to have stark similarities to the accidentally-released content.

But students had been accessing cover sheets posted online by the VCAA well before the assessment authority discovered the error, with word that they contained secret hidden exam questions spreading like wildfire among the VCE’s 90,000-strong cohort.

The Herald Sun previously revealed that 22 cover sheets – also known as instruction booklets – contained case studies and questions that could be found by highlighting blank space and then copying text into a word document.

The VCE discovered the hidden material and swapped the cover sheets online on October 10, but the originals were found by students with the Wayback Machine, an archival website.

But the seven new exam cover sheets were not on the Wayback Machine and were accessed by students before they were discovered by the VCAA.

A veteran VCE co-ordinator said he believed “every exam cover sheet contained hidden material, and we now know students worked it out before the bureaucrats”.

“They were all uploaded in the same way at the same time, so this is a reasonable assumption.”

Some of the leaked questions in Maths Methods 1 and Maths Methods 2 are similar to previous years and could have been expected by students.

Geography had a one-line statement about deforestation on the cover sheet which was included word for word in the actual exam, although the question was changed.

In Product Design, an entire 150-word case study on Mycelium eco-friendly bricks was hidden on the cover sheet then used in slightly different language on the actual exam. The prompt material was used to answer the first nine questions, which are worth 41 out of 90 marks – nearly half the entire marks.

The exam was sat by 2500 students on November 8.

Meanwhile in the Global Politics exam a question worth 20 marks out of a total of 80 was very similar to the one on the cheat sheet material.

On Friday the Herald Sun also revealed the VCAA was forced to recall music exam materials after the musical recordings sent to schools didn’t match the exam paper.

Five new subjects have been found to have cover sheets with hidden questions.

The blunder involved Music Repertoire Performance and Music Contemporary Performance exams, which are being held on Monday and Tuesday next week. Psychology teachers have also complained to the VCAA about the hastily rewritten exam for that subject.

It was sat by 18,000 students on November 4 and contained material that was not on the study design.

The opposition has called for the Labor government to stand down Ms White over the blunder.

Liberal Party early childhood and education spokeswoman Jess Wilson said: “Every day we are seeing further examples of the Minister for Education and the VCAA’s shocking failures which has left this exam period utterly compromised”.

“It’s clear the position of the CEO of the VCAA is untenable and she must resign or be dismissed.”

Education Minister Ben Carroll admitted accountability for the debacle on Friday morning, and reassured students he would get to the bottom of what caused it.