By Noel Towell
Pressure is growing on the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) to find a fix for the leaked questions debacle, which has thrown this year’s VCE exams into chaos.
The peak body for private schools is demanding solutions, amid “frustration and anger” in the sector, and the state opposition wants the authority’s chief executive sacked.
Students and teachers are demanding to know how the compromised exams will be marked.Credit: Joe Armao
The crisis deepened on Friday when it emerged that schools had been ordered by the authority to return exam papers and music recordings intended for use in next week’s VCE music exams because the music did not match the papers.
Fresh material would be delivered by couriers to schools just in time for the Music Repertoire Performance and Music Contemporary Performance tests due to be held on Monday and Tuesday, the authority said.
The VCAA has not moved from its position that no exams have been compromised by the accidental publishing of test questions online, and that marking would proceed as usual, with the authority not responding to questions on Friday.
But there is growing clamour among teachers, parents, students and education sector groups for immediate action from VCAA to ensure no student is disadvantaged.
Independent Schools Victoria chief executive Rachel Holthouse said she had written to Education Minister Ben Carroll to ask what would be done to ensure fairness and integrity in this year’s VCE following the widely circulated cheat sheets.
“Schools need clarity on how the VCAA will assess exam papers to ensure students can be confident in the validity of their final results,” Holthouse said.
“This issue has caused widespread frustration and anger among school communities. It is clear that the ramifications of this issue will continue to spread, up to and beyond the release of this year’s VCE results.”
State Liberals’ education spokesperson Jess Wilson, who wants an Ombudsman’s investigation into the matter, on Friday called for VCAA chief executive Kylie White to resign or be sacked.
Carroll said on Friday that he was accountable for the leaking of questions but said he had been reassured before the exams began late last month that no student “would be impacted” by what the VCAA described as a “production error”.
But the minister told ABC Radio that the “root and branch” review he ordered into the VCAA’s operating model, which has overseen exam bungles across three separate years, will not be in place until next year.
White repeatedly insisted on Thursday, as part of the damage-control effort, that no exams had been compromised.
But leading maths teacher John Kermond told The Age that he was convinced that the students accessing the leaked questions from the specialist maths paper would have a clear advantage over students who had not.
Kermond dismissed the authority’s claims that its last-minute changes to the affected exam papers were enough to prevent the process being compromised.
“It’s completely untenable for [the VCAA] to continue to deny that those particular questions on those particular exams were different enough that no student would have got an advantage,” he said.
VCE student Kayla Wonder made a public plea on Friday for the VCAA to take remedial action.
“Given the circumstances, it is only fair that affected students are offered a derived score as a means of restoring equity,” Wonder wrote.
“Allowing students to be judged by the academic record they have built, rather than an exam compromised by no fault of their own, would be the most just solution.”
The Victorian Association of Commercial Teachers, which represents business, accounting and legal studies educators, also demanded action in a letter this week to the VCAA from association chief executive Geoffrey O’Neill.
“We outlined our concerns and requested a thorough investigation and appropriate actions to uphold fairness and integrity in the VCE assessment process,” O’Neill said in a statement.
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