With two days left of VCE exams, the head of Victoria's Curriculum and Assessment Authority has stepped down after it was revealed last week that with a little detective work, students could access some of their exam questions ahead of time. Last week, education minister Ben Carroll said the questions had been re-written so no student would be disadvantaged. But today, he revealed some questions could have been impacted by the VCAA's error. This is how they plan to deal with their stuff up.
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00:00It's an exam problem that keeps on growing.
00:05The education minister has admitted 56 out of this year's 116 VCE exams were impacted
00:11by what's being labelled human error.
00:14He says the department didn't follow its own protocols, meaning if they went looking
00:18for them, students could find the questions hidden in sample documents.
00:22When this first came out, we were told exam questions had been rewritten and that everything
00:27was fine.
00:30Examinations for the VCE this year have not been compromised.
00:34But everything wasn't fine.
00:36The head of the examination body has since resigned, and while the exam questions were
00:40rewritten, some of them were not rewritten enough.
00:44Sometimes only a word or two was changed.
00:46I was given reassurances that the exam questions that had inadvertently been released and uploaded
00:54with the instruction cover sheets had been rewritten.
00:57And that has proven to be completely unsatisfactory.
01:02The government wants to make sure this year's results are still as fair as possible.
01:06So here's what they plan to do.
01:08They're going to be looking for anomalies.
01:10And if a student does particularly well on the leaked questions, and not nearly as well
01:14on questions that were not leaked, that student's paper will be reviewed.
01:19If the overall results for a leaked question look out of place, that question will be taken
01:23off of every student's final score, even those who did the right thing.
01:27The marking is the starting point.
01:29We see if there's anomalies in the distribution coming out of that.
01:32If there aren't, that's fine, we'll just proceed.
01:34If there are, we'll follow those through and look at the options to ensure that we give
01:38the fairest possible result.
01:39The minister says students can still expect to get their marks on time.
01:43The government will face its own assessment, with an independent root and branch review
01:47of the exam process next year.