By Tom Arup
THE VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students.
Exams for the popular History: Revolution subject were original supposed to include the artwork Storming the Winter palace on 25th October 1917 by Nikolai Kochergin, which depicts events during the October Revolution, which was instrumental in the larger Russian Revolution of 1917.
The image that appeared on the exam paper.
But when students opened their exam this morning they found an altered version of the work with what appear to be a large "BattleTech Marauder" robot aiding the rising revolutionaries in the background.
It is unclear how the doctored version made it into the exam. But a search for the image in Google brings up the robot version as the first result.
The original image.
A picture of the exam paper posted on twitter sources the photo to website all-art.org which also carries the doctored image in the Soviet Union part of its Visual History of the World section.
The robot image is also found on the website Dark Roasted Blend, which describes itself as one of the internet's "favourite destinations on the web for all things weird and wonderful."
A spokesman for the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) said the image was "sourced and acknowledged by the VCAA as coming from the Internet".
"The image has been altered but the alteration of the image won’t impact on the students’ capacity to answer the examination question," he said.
A BattleTech Marauder.
"The VCAA will monitor students' answers to ensure that any student who has been distracted by the image will not be disadvantaged."
It is the second year running that the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has been embarrassed by problems in its end of year exam papers.
Last year popular columnist Helen Razer accused the VCE exam body of plagiarism and breach of copyright after the English exam featured on tattoos by the Melbourne writer without her permission or acknowledging she was the author.