Month: November 2023

This is the (new) newly established home for Foundation Mathematics exam errors. The guidelines are given on the Methods error post, and there is also a Specialist error post, and a (now renamed) General error post (with unchanged link).  As with General Maths, I will not look much at the Foundation exams, only posting errors as they are brought to my attention.

If you suspect that there is an error that is not included in the list, or that an “error” has wrongly been included, please add a comment or contact me, and I’ll check it out.

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2025 Exam (Exam here, marking guide here (W,I), report here (W,I) – discussed here)

MCQ12 The question is ambiguous, and gratuitously so. Encountering heavy traffic “while traveling on both roads” is intended to mean both roads have heavy traffic.

QB9(b) The cost of a quantity of milk being in direct variation to its volume bears no given relation to the percentage of the coffee cost being due to the milk. There is probably only one way to answer the question but the question appears to be plain nuts.

2024 Exam (Exam here, marking guide here (WI, updated 16/02/25) – discussed here, report here (W,I))

MCQ10 There are two possibly correct answers, depending upon rounding.

MCQ20 An improperly defined, and bad, hexagon tiling question. Just a mess, and essentially the same as we hammered as a sample question. 

2023 Exam (Exam here, report here (Word, idiots) – discussed here and here, report here (W,I))

MCQ 12 (added 19/07/24) A pretty screwy question, with a list of percentage returns from superannuation accounts (plural), one for each year. In any case, adding the percentages, as indicated in the exam report, makes no sense and cannot indicate whether the returns “showed an overall gain”.

MCQ13 The key to the graph is confusing, and wrong. Some indication that “payment” and “interest” are cumulative had to be included.

MCQ 19 (added 19/07/24) There is no indication in the question prompt that the path corners should be taken to be quarter circles (and the report’s computation of these areas is a pretty tedious way to estimate the area of the path).

Q1(a) (added 19/07/24) The exam report puzzles over “replicated” values, 15 x 15 and so on, whereas it seems clear that this was students answering with Length x Width, where the two dimensions happened to be equal. It seems unlikely that students were penalised for this, but there is no way to be sure. (Possibly, the question was intended to refer to “long single” rather than “king single” mattresses.)

Q1(b) (added 19/07/24) The exam report comments on showing how to “convert 54.33 cm”, when the reference should have been to 54.33 inches.

Q1(c) There are two methods of working out the percentage increase, which give different answers. One method is unlikely to have been considered by students, but this still should not occur.

Q2(a) (added 19/07/24) A very poorly worded and ambiguous question, asking for “the four sport activities” that “are not shown on both lists”. This is intended to refer to sports that appear in one or other of the two given lists, but not both. Some students, however, interpreted the question to permit (or require) the sports to not appear in either list. The exam report then whines about students who thus interpreted the question, not understanding (or at least not admitting) that students were misled by the crappy wording. It is unclear whether students were penalised for such answers.

Q2(e) The question makes zero sense, since it assumes that a person cannot play both a ball sport and a non-ball sport. The question also fails to specify the percentage is of females participating in a sport. (Added 19/07/24) As Jay pointed out in a comment, students were instructed to “use the graph”, even though the graph is faulty. The exam report then whines about students who attempted to follow this instruction as written, “interpreting the graph literally”, rather than as was intended (to use only the existing bar on the graph). For the thousandth time, VCAA stuffs up the wording and then blames students for the stuff up.

Q3(d) (added 19/07/24) As pointed out by Jay in a comment, the question is fatally, hilariously ambiguous. The exam report interprets “the volume of water … needed” to be the water explicitly combined with vinegar and the garden spray to make the custom mixture, ignoring that water had also been used earlier, in the production of the garden spray.

Q4(b) (added 19/07/24) The question asks for the “total sales revenue earned for these two cars” but is ambiguous, since the question can naturally be interpreted as asking for the “total” revenue separately, for each of the two cars. (Not that it matters much, but the proper plural for “revenue” is “revenue”.) The exam report indicates that students who answered the question in this manner were cheated of their mark.

Q4(c) (added 19/07/24) The question is fatally ambiguous, and the solution indicated in the exam report is the worse option. The question asks for the stamp duty on a car, calculated at “a flat rate of $8.40 per $200”. The natural interpretation (and the financial reality) is that the duty is calculated as “or part thereof”: any final fraction of $200 attracts the full $8.40 of duty. This cannot be assumed, however, and the exam report instead provides a pro rata calculation. The final (rounded) answer is the same, but the question is still screwed.

Q5(b) (added 19/07/24) The question asks students to round to the nearest year, but the exam report rounds up. While the final answer is the same, the method indicated in the report is wrong for the question as asked.

Q6 An awfully written question, throughout confusing usage with market share. There is probably only one plausible way to answer the questions, but this is teaching Not Maths.

Q6(a) The 2022 percentages in the graph do not total to 100%. This in itself is ok, but it leads to two potential answers to (a); one answer is unlikely to be given, but this still should not occur. The graph should have been appropriately labelled.

Q6(b) (added 19/07/24) The “percentage decrease” (of something) is not the same as the decrease in the percentage (where the percentage is itself the thing decreasing), the latter being what was clearly intended.

Q6(d) (added 19/07/24) The same issue as in 6(b).

Q7(a) (added 19/07/24) The questions asks for the answer to be given in cent per litre, and then the exam report whines about students “including the units of dollars”. Which would be fair enough, except that the exam report’s answer provides no units at all.

Q9(e) (added 19/07/24) The question asks for the cheaper option and the amount of money saved. The exam report then whines about students failing to indicate “the time period linked to the saving”, even though this was not asked for in the question (and which anyway was indicated as a fixed period of time in the question prompt).

Q11 The outer rectangle on the diagram doesn’t mean anything and was probably actively confusing.

Q11(b) (added 19/07/24) Part (a) asks for the volume of concrete for the slab of a house, rounded “to the nearest cubic metre”. That is absurd in the context, and results in rounding down from 6.006 to 6, which are also confusingly numbers that should be avoided on an exam, but whatever. Part (b), however, first notes that concrete “is sold in cubic metres” and then asks students to “calculate the cost of the concrete for the slab”. The report then whines about students using the rounded answer of 6 rather than 6.006 for the volume, leading to an “inaccurate response” (although the required rounded answer was the same). Which is sort of fine, except that one would in fact need to purchase 7 cubic metres of concrete. One might argue that “the cost of the concrete for the slab” refers to the 6.006 m³ concrete used rather than the 7 m³ concrete purchased, and one would have to be a bona fide idiot to try to defend the question in such a manner.