‘No confidence’: Students given access to ’similar’ questions before final VCE exams

Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll has asked ‘very hard questions’ of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority boss after students accessed hidden sample questions before their exams.

Deputy Premier and Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll. Picture: Getty Images

The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has defended the integrity of its testing after thousands of students had access to nearly identical questions prior to sitting their Victorian Certificate of Education examinations. 

Students found hidden exam questions inadvertently included in sample cover sheets on the VCAA website, and discussed on social media platform Reddit that if they copied and pasted the blank spaces of the sheet into a Word document, questions and case studies would appear, the Herald Sun reported.

It is VCAA practice to upload cover sheets with details such as the structure and length of an examination, but not the content.

Potential cheat sheets were found for eight exams, including business management, specialist maths and legal studies tests, which have already been sat.

VCAA discovered the error in mid-October and issued new booklets, however some students had already downloaded the sheets or used an internet archive website to access them.

VCAA chief executive Kylie White blamed the bungle on a production issue and said a review had been done to ensure the exam questions were different to the sample material. However, some of the final exam content appeared to be similar to the material in the cover sheets.

Year 12 students highlighted parts of the exam cover pages to unveil hidden text with questions that appeared on their real exam. Picture: Herald Sun,

“The VCE examinations haven’t been compromised, and all students can be very confident about completing their exams,” Ms White told ABC radio on Thursday.

“There are similarities, and over the past exams you will see similar similarities with exam questions and that’s largely because the content of exams is the same each year.

“I would add that if students had seen the sample material before sitting the exams, there will not have been an advantage to any of those students, because they wouldn’t have been able to interpret or respond to the questions, because the questions were different.”

Ms White said that VCAA’s exams are prepared with “extensive quality assurance”.

Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll said he was alerted to the production issue two weeks ago but that he had been briefed on the situation in a “high level of detail” on Wednesday night.

“I’ve asked some very hard questions of the VCAA CEO,” the Deputy Premier said.

“No student is sitting in an examination that will be a copy of the sample questions that some of the students have seen.

“There has been human error here, it’s still not acceptable human error, and I will get to the bottom of this.”

The blunder comes off the back of a review into last year’s VCE exams handed down earlier this year that confirmed mistakes in last year’s tests, including five errors in a maths exam.

“We have a brand new chief executive officer, there has been a lot of change to the VCAA,” Mr Carroll said.

State Opposition Education spokeswoman Jess Wilson called for an independent review of VCAA, as she took a swipe at Ms White and Mr Carroll.

“I think it’s clear we cannot have confidence in the new CEO. In fact, the final exam period this time has affected more students than what it did last year … we’re sitting and looking at a worse situation,” she said.

“The minister’s competency has to come into question. We have to understand how he is allowing this to happen year on year.”