VCAA’s Greater Literary Offenses

The difficulty of critiquing VCAA mathematics exams is capturing the variety and the frequency and the depth of the flaws, and then summing the overall effect, the fundamentally impoverished approach to mathematics and its testing. Documenting straight out errors is not overly difficult, and even non sequitur questions are manageable: the error or weirdness typically […]

VCAA’s 2022 Exam Reports Are Up

Sorry, no energy for a joke title. The reports are here (Word, idiots): Specialist Exam 1 report (and exam) Specialist Exam 2 report (and exam) Methods Exam 1 report (and exam) Methods Exam 2 Report (and exam) For background, readers may wish to go to the following blog posts: Specialist Error List (and see here, […]

WitCH 92: The Webs VCAA Weaves

This is a continuation of a previous WitCH. To provide teachers with some guidance on the new VCE Specialist Mathematics curriculum (Word, idiots, and see comments here), VCAA had posted two webinars, on proof by contradiction and proof by induction; we WitCHed it. VCAA has now added four new webinars, which can be viewed here, […]

VCAA’s Lesser Literary Offenses

One of the all-time great literary wallops, by one of the all-time great writers, is Mark Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses: Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in “Deerslayer,” and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It […]

VCAA’s Draft Feedback Due TODAY

We’ve been remiss in not writing further on VCAA’s draft for the new mathematics VCE subjects. It’s just, for reasons we’ll explain briefly here and flesh out elsewhere, we’ve struggled to face up to this new nonsense. But, feedback is due TODAY (midnight? – see links below), and we really oughta say something. So, here […]