Some Of The 2024 VCE Exam Questions Have Been Leaked

How will VCE scores be affected?

High school students sitting their VCE exams this year have been left feeling a bit cheated as exam questions were leaked online through the practice exam sheets on the Victoria’s Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) website.

The questions were found hidden in the practice cover pages. Some students found they could copy and paste the hidden text on the cover to reveal it.

Cover page with questions highlighted:

Questions copy and pasted:

The VCCA said it became aware of the hidden questions in mid-October and removed the impacted cover sheets from the website.

However, with a bit of sleuthing through an online archive, the original documents could still be accessed.

Which subjects were affected by the leak?

The leak affected 56 out of 116 VCE exams including English, English as an Additional Language, Australian Politics, Business Management and Legal Studies.

Other subjects which had questions leaked included Applied Computing Data Analysis, Art Making and Exhibiting, Food Studies, Global Politics, and VET Integrated Technologies. These had multiple choice questions and questions that offered multiple marks.

The wrong recordings were also sent to schools for their Music Performance examination.

The Victorian Education Minister, Ben Carroll has ordered a review into the VCAA and revealed plans for an independent monitor.

The chief executive of the VCE exam authority, Kylie White, has resigned since this exam blunder. Caroll has also apologised to students publicly, saying that year 12 exams are stressful enough already.

What does this mean for students taking their VCE exams?

Similarly to the Consideration of Disadvantage Process during the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be a panel of experts working to review, analyse and adjust student marks to try and ensure students are marked fairly.

On the panel is former VCAA boss John Firth who told The Age that “There [is] other data available to us to make sure that we can, case by case, subject by subject, look at the students marks and make sure no student has been disadvantaged or advantaged by access to the previously published material.”

However, he said he didn’t want to pre-empt docking marks.

“If, say, a multiple choice question worth one mark performed inconsistently with the rest of the paper, then you could take that mark off or ignore that question,” he said.

Firth also said the panel had access to enough data to compare to other students and their performance on other questions in the affected exams.

There’s been no clear answer yet on whether students will be deducted or receive automatic full marks for the affected exam questions.