Lying, Thinking of England, Command Terms, Sketchy Logic and VCAA’s Accountability

This post is a mulligan stew. I’m still crazy-busy, making it very difficult to find any peace or writing rhythm to tackle the posts that I’m keener to do. There have also been a few “maybe” news stories to write about, and some follow-up slaps to hand to VCAA, but nothing sufficiently compelling to make the time. So, I’ve decided to just throw a few leftovers together in a pot and call it a post. Then, I’ll look to get to the larger posts, quietly stewing on back burners. (As it is, the AMSI-MAV clown show and Geoff Masters being a nitwit, again, will just have to be left on the shelf.)

Recently, a couple of semi-interesting stories hit the news, regarding exams kerfuffles in the United Kingdom.¹ The first story concerned OCR, an offshoot of Cambridge University Press, being fined £250,000 for some errors on an English A-level physics paper last year. Some of the errors were picked up prior to the exam and were announced at the beginning of the exam, but two errors were only “identified” after results day; Then, “Correction of these errors led to 37 students receiving a grade increase by 1 grade”.

Without getting into the nature of the errors – it reads as if they were more administrative failings than issues of discipline incompetence – there are a few things that stand out for we Victorians. Firstly, the English system is clearly different, with the production of exams outsourced to private bodies, which are then able to be held to account. Whatever, it would be a real help if VCAA were practically accountable to some body other than VCAA: the continual business of VCAA’s junior level nitwits being shielded by VCAA’s senior level nitwits is simply a farce. Secondly, it is notable that the process in England worked even after results day, with students’ results being amended. To that end, the English story is reminiscent of QCAA, which exhibited self-administered class when caught in a similar position, a class inconceivable in Victoria; evidently, no one now at VCAA has the balls to admit when VCAA has stuffed something up. Which brings us to to the third point, that the English report is almost certainly false: there is a snowflake’s chance in hell that the two later errors were only “identified” after results day. Those errors would have very likely been identified on exams day or very soon after, as is almost always the case. What almost certainly happened is that the errors were confessed by OCR after results day. And, if there had not been a regulatory body breathing down OCR’s neck, OCR may well have never confessed, exactly as VCAA never confesses.

There’s a side note to this first UK exam story. With a regulatory body in place to field complaints, it is not surprising that there are other dust-ups, and there is an on-going kerfuffle with OCR and an issue on a 2025 GCSE mathematics exam; in this case, although the regulatory body seemingly sided with the complainants, OCR has not admitted a grading error and the question has not been regraded. Readers can learn all about the issue at this post.² Who is right? It smells as if OCR got it wrong but I honestly don’t care. The issue concerns a Furtherish question on rounding and bounds, and acceptable methods to determine whether a fridge of a certain measured “width” can fit in a space of a certain measured “width”. What is striking, however, apart from the who-gives-a-stuff nature of the exam question, is how much energy is going into such a minor matter. Yes, the complainants have a point, and are probably correct. But, while England is worrying about fridge gaps, VCAA cannot determine the contrapositive of “Not all vertices are of even degree” and SCSA, the WA curriculum authority, believes that the complex number i is greater than 0.³ I find it very difficult to be much concerned for England.

The second UK exam story is less interesting but also has some Victorian echoes. It concerns a reportedly difficult senior Scottish mathematics exam, which left students “hopeless and crying”. No big deal. Tough exam stories are a news staple and generally have as little reliability and meaning and interest as the periodic “no one agrees on the answer” BODMAS stories. What makes the Scottish story more interesting is that the 2026 exams were the first under the control of Qualifications Scotland, a new curriculum authority.

Did the new authority get it wrong? Quite possibly, but without digging deep, which is not worth our time, it is impossible to tell, and certainly no one’s word is to be trusted. It is very easy for a new authority to get things a little wrong, with consequent big effect. It also very easy, however, for whiny students and whinier teachers, all of whom are ever on the lookout for someone to blame other than themselves, to take a whack at a new, easy target.

Interestingly, one of the central complaints regarding the Scottish exam was its employment of “command words”, terms such as “find” and “evaluate” and so on, which indicate the nature of the students’ tasks and thus how marks are likely to be awarded. Reports are that the command words and/or their use was unfamiliar. Again, this would be an easy thing for a new authority to get at least somewhat “wrong” and, again, one would have to check; the reports are disputed.

The Scottish story raises a very interesting question, however, which may or may not apply to the Scottish situation but certainly applies in many parts of Australia: what if a curriculum authority has thoroughly stuffed things up and then a new or revamped curriculum authority tries to put things right? In that case, the new/revamped authority, even if they have done nothing wrong and plenty right, will nonetheless run a great risk of being pilloried: whiny students and whinier teachers, who have practised for and are expecting the traditional garbage, will have no mindset to recognise, much less appreciate, any improvement.

The obvious example of this is CAS, which has done as much as anything to destroy Victorian secondary school mathematics. It simply has to go. But, the VCAA-MAV Cult of Stupidity, too ignorant to know what mathematics is and too hooked on techno-drug money to care, has indoctrinated a generation of teachers, so that this utter madness is now widely accepted as normalcy. Removing this pedagogical abomination would not result in wide-spread gratitude or relief, at least not immediately, but in confusion.

A second example, much smaller in effect but arrogantly idiotic, and tying in with the Scottish story, is the command term “show that”: students are constantly interpreting “show that” other than VCAA demands because, simply, VCAA gets it wrong. VCAA’s meaning of the term fundamentally conflicts with standard English usage, and with the usage by mathematicians. If a new or revamped authority were to suddenly use “show that” in a proper manner, however, then many students and teachers, brought up on VCAA’s faux-English, would be very confused.

This brings us to the last ingredient of this stew post: VCAA’s general use of command terms and of one term in particular. In brief, VCAA sucks at this; they employ way too many command terms and not consistently or predictably well. VCAA’s lazy and misleading use of “write down”, for example, definitely led to many students being screwed out of a mark on last year’s MM2. In fact, VCAA recently tried to address their command terms problem but they bollocksed it, because of course they did.

Now, to one command term and the very final part of this post: “sketch”. It is difficult to imagine the command to “sketch” being an issue but, always on the lookout for news ways to be really stupid, VCAA has made it so.

“Sketch” means sketch: create a simple graph or diagram to illustrate the essential features of the function or whatever. Above are sketches I drew the other day when discussing something with a (very bright) student. They are obviously crazy-rough sketches but they were all that was needed for our purposes at the time. Which is the point: a sketch is for a particular purpose and the accuracy of a sketch, and what information is included, is only sensible to the extent that it serves that purpose. It is not just useless to include superfluous information or unrequired accuracy, it is actively bad; it actively distracts from the purpose.

VCAA has lost all sight of this. In VCAA’s hands, the centuries old and very natural task to “sketch” has been transformed into CAS-fuelled little Hitler fetishism, which screwed both Methods and Specialist students last year, and which will presumably screw more students in 2026. As it stands, VCE students can have absolutely no reliable sense of what plain old “sketch” means. It is absolute idiocy, courtesy of absolute idiots. VCAA is utterly stuffed.

That’s the stew. We’ll hopefully be back with more considered dishes in the near future.

1. Thank you to the readers who brought these stories to my attention. I have enough news alerts that I typically see such things, but I always appreciate people suggesting possible blog fodder.

2. Bonus points for anyone who can spot the (an?) error in the GCSE post.

3. There are things I cannot write about, at least not yet. Suffice to say, SCSA appears to be as mind-blowingly arrogant and stupid as VCAA was in 2022.