What Are the “Errors” on the 2023 VCE Mathematics Exams?

Given the wide interest, I think it is worth compiling all the “errors” on this year’s six maths exams. (See here, here, here, here, here and here for the discussion posts.) So, please list whatever you believe to be an error, and please indicate whether you regard each error as “major” or “minor” (see below). Justification is not required but may be helpful. Then, soon, I’ll try to update the post with a summary. Continue reading “What Are the “Errors” on the 2023 VCE Mathematics Exams?”

VCAA Has Deloitte to Learn

Last year, as seemingly occurs every year, there were serious errors on the VCE mathematics exams. This was reported on at the time by the Age, on the basis of a teacher’s complaint and a comment on this blog. The errors were reported on again last month by the Herald Sun, on the basis of a parliamentary submission. I was pleased to see these reports although they were not my doing. I did not notify any reporters of the exam errors and no reporter had asked me for comment until after the recent Herald Sun and Guardian articles on this year’s General Mathematics exam errors.

As I routinely do, I quickly blogged on some (but not all) of the 2022 errors (here, here, here and here), but other than that I had been as quiet as possible about the whole thing, even on this blog. For a reason, and until now.

Continue reading “VCAA Has Deloitte to Learn”

Open Letter to the Victorian Minister for Education

As I wrote about briefly, in December last year Burkard and I wrote a critique of the VCE mathematics exams, which was to form the basis of VCAA’s external review. As I’ve just written, here, dealing with VCAA was incredibly frustrating. More importantly, the overview VCAA released to us has entirely hidden the substance of the external review, and/but the review seems to be nothing more than distraction and whitewash. In particular, there still seems to be no clear appreciation within VCAA that mathematical truth is a thing, and that properly qualified mathematicians are by far the best judges of that thing.

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Witch 113: Smoothing Over the Cracks

This one is a combo WitCH. The main concern is a multiple choice question from last week’s Methods Exam 2. The question may not be an “error” in the newspaper sense, but it is bad. To appreciate some (but far from all) of its badness, however, we need to see VCAA’s solution. We won’t likely see that solution, however however, for months, if ever; transparency is not VCAA’s strong suit (Section 7).

To deal with this, we’ve teamed up last week’s MCQ with a similar MCQ from the 2021 Exam 2, together with VCAA’s solution to that earlier question from the exam report. Last week’s question appears first. Continue reading “Witch 113: Smoothing Over the Cracks”

Quick Comments on the General Mathematics Exam Error

The General examfghtrefcwetiofe …

Let’s try again:

Sparked by the report in the Herald-Sun, the matrix error (and the who cares “of-of” error) on the General Mathematics Exam 2 has obviously received a lot of attention. This has included apologies from VCAA, from the CEO of VCAA, and from the Minister of Education. It has also led to VCAA announcing that all students would receive the mark for the question.

We haven’t looked at the exam question (or the exam), and so know nothing of the question beyond what commenters have suggested. Even without knowing the details, however, there seem some obvious things to note, or at least they will be obvious for the regulars at this blog and for the similarly disenchanted.

Continue reading “Quick Comments on the General Mathematics Exam Error”