“We always aim to assess fairly and look to award marks rather than take them away.”
It is one thing for VCAA to be anal-retentive assholes, and it is another for them to lie through their teeth about it.
The following is Q1(a) of 2025 Specialist Mathematics Exam 2: and the marking guide (W,I) for this question:
Yes, once again, VCAA’s assessment clowns have employed ludicrous error bars in order to determine the “correct shape” of the graph. Why not also draw the error bars, as they did last year? One can only conjecture. One can also only conjecture why other error bars, which it seems were also employed in the grading of this question, are not even alluded to in the marking guide.
There is zero doubt, of course, that such pointlessness and nastiness was endemic in the grading of the 2025 exams, as it is every year. There is particular Methods madness about which I intend to post soon. The value of this error bar madness is that it is explicit and it is starkly insane. Anyone who proposes such grading, anyone who condones such grading, anyone directed to grade in such a manner and who fails to object, has no proper business in the assessment of high-stakes mathematics exams.
Does Boss Smith care at all about this madness? Is he aware that such gratuitous nastiness is the reason everyone loathes VCAA? God only knows. I can see no sign of it.
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UPDATE (02/02/26)
The examiners sermonise on students’ failings:
Many graphs were not accurately drawn. To improve accuracy, students can sketch the function on their CAS calculator and set the domain, range and scale to match those provided in the question.
This is all so insanely stupid.
As horrible as this is – I’m still puzzled/worried about the need to label an asymptote which is also an axis. Just all seems a bit… excessive?
If that were the worst there …
I have no particular problems with that. The asymptote question is natural and clear, even if the answer is somewhat already-done. None of that is true of this error bar madness.
I don’t even know what they mean.
“Left hand (i’m presuming) between (-2, 0.5) and (-2, 1)”
What?
I think the only possible interpretation is that graph drawn by the student must pass through the line x = –2 somewhere between y = 0.5 and y = 1.
Exam 2, so it’s an exercise in can you plot a graph on your cas calculator! A smart Y10 or average Y11 should be able to do it! There is little math in the question. Many of the students doing this question, could expect that in 6 months’ time they would be expected to do this question without a (cas) calculator. This question is a classic case of dumbing down students before they start University!
CAS poisons everything.
Yes, the question, which is intrinsically a perfectly fine graphing question, is made utterly inane by the CASification. Then, these ideologically perverted nitwits think: “Well, they have CAS to do it, so what can we ask of them?” And, the utterly insane answer is to demand the students graph very carefully what the idiot box spits out and mark the students according to-be-revealed-later-but-only-in-part error bars.
The thing starts out as madness and ends up even madder.
I would be interested to know what input university experts have in the finalisation of the marking guide. I am aware that they would have been part of the development through writing but I know as an assessor that the guides often are rewritten at the training meeting destroying many good intentions.
I do not know how much the writers and/or vetters have input into and/or see the marking guides. I do not know how or when insanity like the error bars first appears, and who has the opportunity to kill it. But, however it happens, and however the error bars came about, you make a critical point: the “finalisation” of the marking guides is not properly the finalisation.
There will always be judgment calls and adjustments during the marking process. Which means you gotta have sane grown-ups in the room. I am not aware of that currently being the case.
People should take care with their comments.
I think the question would be better without the gridlines/axes at all.
Of course it would. The gridlines are fatal.
Why would the question “be better without the gridlines/axes at all.”
The axes are ok. The gridlines are obviously a disaster.
Is this because it suggests that a high degree of accuracy is required?
Because it suggests *any* degree of accuracy is required.
It seems that students have to sketch the graph on the examination paper. What do you suggest would be an improvement in framing such a question? I ask this because at my school we often ask students to sketch graphs in tests.
Or are you more concerned with the marking scheme?
I’m appalled by both.
As pretty much everyone has pointed out here, the purpose of a sketch is to indicate the general shape and the important features of a graph, and nothing else. A sense of scale is almost entirely irrelevant.
Axes are fine, because axes are axes. I would not indicate the scale on the axes with coordinates or whatever, because whatever important points/intercepts the kids have to plot will set the scale anyway, and they shouldn’t be fussing if their point is lining up with a 3 on the y-axis or whatever.
This is all just an idiotic product of the idiotic CAS cart leading the horse. Only a lobotomised ideologue could imagine there is any value in such a question or any integrity in such grading of such a question.
Sorry, by axes I meant axis labels.
Not the main point, obviously, but an interesting question. If the labels were not included then there would be nothing mathematically wrong with a weirdo kid making y the horizontal and x the vertical, but no one would be happy about it. Or, what if a kid left off the axis labels?
In a Year 9 question I’d leave the axis labels off to ensure kids are learning the convention. In a Year 12 question I think I’d include them.
This is a question that has no place on a state examination and kids having access to CAS makes it pointless. It is fine in a situation where the teacher can give it to the students and unpack it with them afterwards. A sketch is just that, a look at the characteristics of the function involved, using algebraic and anlaytic tools available, identify its possible salient features, surmise what its graph will look like, and then use the CAS to fine down the details. I used to tell students when they use a computer or calculator, they should have some idea about what the output will be so that they are either surprised or gratified at the result.
Another interesting thing about CAS is the importance of scale. Sometimes there are limitations that obscure the significant features.
Initially I thought it a very difficult question, but a good challenge to separate out the 3 components and consider how they might add up.
Then I read that it’s a CAS question and what on earth is the point of sketching a graph when you have a CAS? So I thought it looks worthy of the Dame Slap award (see below), but actually it’s even worse as even Dame Slap allows answers to her ridiculous questions, whereas VCAA gives nonsensical marking schemes!
…..
The more the children looked at the three questions on the board, the more they felt certain they could never answer them. Moon-Face turned to Connie. “Quick! Tell us the right answers. You said you were good at lessons.”
Connie read the first question. “Three blackbirds sat on a cherry tree. They ate one hundred and twenty-three of the cherries. How many were left?”
“Well, how can we say, unless we know how many there were in the beginning?” said Connie, out loud. “What a silly question!”
Jo read the next one out loud. “If there are a hundred pages in a book, how many books would there be on the shelf?’
“The questions are just nonsense,” said Moon-Face, gloomily.
“They were before, when we were here,” said Jo.
The third question was very short. Jo read it out. “Why is a blackboard?’
“Why is a blackboard!” repeated Silky. “There is no sense in that question either.”
“Well—the questions are nonsense, so we’ll put down answers that are nonsense,” said Jo.
So they put down “none” about how many cherries were left on the tree. Then they read the book-question again. And again they put down “none”.
“We are not told that the shelf was a bookshelf,” said Jo. “It might be a shelf for ornaments, or a bathroom shelf for glasses and tooth-brushes and things. There wouldn’t be any books there.”
The third question was a puzzler. “Why is a blackboard?”
Jo ran out of his place and rubbed out the two last words. He wrote them again—and then the question read “Why is a board black?”
“We can easily answer that,” said Jo, with a grin. “Why is a board black? So that we can write on it with white chalk!”
So, when Dame Slap came back, the only people who had answered all the questions were Jo, Silky, Moon-Face and Connie! Dame Slap beamed at them.
“Dear me, I have some clever children at last!” she said. “You have written answers to all the questions.”
“Then they are right?” asked Silky, in wonder.
“I don’t know,” said Dame Slap. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s the answers I want. I don’t care what’s in them, so long as you have written answers. I don’t know the answers myself, so it’s no good my reading them.”
JJ, you’ve captured it perfectly.
“There is particular Methods madness about which I intend to post soon.”
And, from what I have heard, General madness. All entirely predictable given the fairly easy exams.
I don’t know of the General madness (as opposed to the general madness, of which we are all too much aware). SRK, if you want to email me, I’ll look into it.
SRK has now emailed me. GM is not my turf, so I am very careful to pronounce on GM things, and coming to me it is now Nth hand information. I will have to think and inquire. But, on its face, it looks pretty insane. Stay tuned.
A few observations, and I will try to be measured in my language…
1. By asking for coordinates “to X decimal places” the examiners are putting their thumb on the “don’t think, do it by graph on the calculator” scale quite heavily.
2. But to check that students can copy a graph from a screen, they have to find an obscure point, not near the key features, and check that this point has been plotted correctly. Why? It is not a key feature!
3. What about students who sit a computer-based examination (CBE)? Are these still a thing? Back when Sai (was that his name) wrote about how to game the Methods exam… does that give an unfair advantage to a (small, but non-zero) group of students?
In summary: how does this marking scheme encourage anything other than pedantry?
Bingo on 1 and 2. I’m not sure if CBE is still a thing. (Yes, it was Sai.)
This is a rather nit-picky argument (but I think there is something here) but the command term “Give” used in this question is not one of VCAA’s defined command terms:
https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vcaa.vic.edu.au%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2FDocuments%2Fexams%2FGlossaryofCommandTerms.docx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK
So… how is the command “give” meant to be interpreted? Sloppy writing at the very least I would suggest…
(I only looked at this document because I thought, wrongly, it may give a definition of the command term “sketch”.)
I guess the point is that the students have already been directed to “label” the point of inflection, so how do you then ask for the desired accuracy? “Give” sounds a little clunky but I’m not sure how you’d want to word it (and I don’t really care).