SA Year 12 exam: computer says no

Close to 3000 students were unable to complete their final psychology exam after technical issues promoted organisers to call it off.

SACE Board chief executive Martin Westwell.

A move towards electronic exams in South Australia has been marred by a technical fault that prevented thousands of Year 12 psychology students from completing their final assessme­nt.

An investigation is under way into the cause of the “unforeseen technical issue”, which became apparent about 30 minutes into the 130-minute exam on Wednesday morning.

Students reported receiving “error” and “try again” messages that left them unable to progress though the assessment, which is worth 30 per cent of the overall subject score.

The board that oversees the South Australian Certificate of Education said 2720 students across 164 exam centres had been impacted by a decision to halt the exam.

They will not be required to resit the test and will instead receive­ a derived result, which is a SACE-generated score based on each student’s achievement in school-based assessments and a predicted exam result provided by their teacher.

In an email to principals, SACE Board chief executive Martin Westwell acknowledged that the situation was “incredibly disappointing”.

“Some students were able to continue with the exam, but due to the disruption, the right course of action was to stop the exam and move to a derived result­ for all students,” Professor Westwell said. “As always, our guiding principle is that no stud­ent is disadvantaged.

“I do apologise to all students that they didn’t get the experience we had planned for today. We will take today’s events into the continued development of electronic exams.”

In a subsequent email, he said further investigations suggested the issue was thought to be contained to the psychology exam — caused by the incorporation of a video file — and the remaining two e-exams, for tourism and nutrition, would go ahead.

South Australia has been moving towards replac­ing written tests with e-exams for Year 12 students, and trialled them in three subjects last year. Six more subjects, includin­g psychology, biology, legal studies and English liter­ature, were converted to the e-exam format this year.

The glitch is reminiscent of last year’s NAPLAN debacle, in which hundreds of schools transitioning to online tests reported technical problems, prompting thousands of students to re-sit assessments.