Students and teachers describe the maths methods exam as unfairly difficult

Victorian teachers have raised concerns about mistakes in a VCE exam as well as the use of a “very lazy” recycled question from a previous year’s exam.

VCE maths methods mayhem continues, with a “cheap knock-off” question recycled from a previous exam and three more errors detected in the second exam.

This exam was sat by around 15,000 students last Thursday, with examiners asking students to edit a question by changing “m” to “metres”.

But three more serious issues have since arisen. The first is that many teachers agree the word “maximal” is missing in question 5 part b.

The second is that in number 9 of the multiple choice questions, the word “smooth” should be replaced with the word “differentiable”.

Multiple errors were discovered in the VCE maths methods exam.

The third is that the word “maximum” is missing from question 4 part f.

One teacher said the problem in question 4, which he called a “cheap knock-off of the 2009 maths methods exam question 3”, also existed in the earlier exam.

These maths methods exams issues come in addition to errors in the general maths exam which led to students being awarded an additional mark. They also come amid VCAA maths errors detailed by maths teachers going back 20 years or more.

The recycling of question 4 from 2009 has raised eyebrows, with one teacher saying that “questions from old past exams are often recycled but are usually modified and disguised much better than this one”.

“The uncanny similarity was obvious at a glance. Very lazy. There will be students who would have seen the 2009 question and may well have included solutions in their bound reference”. Bound books could be brought into the exam.

The VCAA has past exams and answers going back to 2006 on their website, so the 2009 exam and solution was freely available to students this year.

In 2023, the 15-mark ten-part exam question 4 starts: “A manufacturer produces tennis balls. The diameter of the tennis balls is a normally distributed random variable D, which has a mean of 6.7cm and a standard deviation of 0.1cms”.

In 2009 the 17-mark question 3 read: “The Bouncy Ball Company (BBC) makes

tennis balls whose diameters are normally distributed with mean 67 mm and standard deviation 1 mm”.

A number of the sub-parts in this question are almost exactly the same.

Students and teachers debated the exam online, with many saying it was unfairly difficult.

One teacher who has taught maths for ten years said they “personally struggled with finishing this to time”.

Others said the exam “set high achievers up to fail”

One student said it was “like watching my study score’s funeral” and another said they can

“now calculate the rate at which my depression increases (hint: for years 2022 and 2023 it was strictly increasing)”.

Mathematicians on one blog described the fact that the word “maximal” was missing from question 5 as “a pretty bad oversight” and reflecting “systematic awfulness” within the VCAA.

One commentator said it reflected an ongoing issue where students have to guess what a question intends instead of the wording making it clear.

“The first thing any attentive vetter would have noticed about part (b) is that the maximal domain and range are intended. The attentive vetter then provides feedback that insertion of the word “maximal” is necessary,” they said.

The problem in question 4 part f was also raised by Bryn Humberstone, head of maths at Brighton Grammar, who made a YouTube clip about an error in a question in the general maths exam.