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A report costing the taxpayer $40,000 has found that Victoria’s under-fire exam authority re-uploaded VCE cover sheets that were compromised with hidden data even after last year’s debacle was brought to light.
Documents obtained by The Age reveal the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority tried to “sanitise” the exam documents following the initial breach in November 2024 in which questions on 56 test papers were inadvertently published online.
Students sitting a VCE practice exam in October.Credit: Joe Armao
According to documents obtained via a freedom of information request, the Department of Government Services paid $39,472.13 to consultancy firm Scyne Advisory to learn what VCE exams had been breached, and the scale of the breach between December 3 and December 5, 2024.
The analysis uncovered an additional nine subjects had cover sheets with hidden information on them, bringing the number to 65 in total – more than half of the 116 VCE subjects. The additional subjects uncovered by Scyne were Australian history, chemistry, Chinese language, culture and society, general maths 1 and 2, Latin, physics, philosophy, and visual communication design.
It also found the VCAA attempted to “sanitise” the cover sheets and republish them, but more than a dozen were re-uploaded while still compromised.
“Our analysis also identified 17 cover sheets that were re-uploaded to the VCAA website still contained concealed data, indicating that the sanitisation process did not consistently remove concealed data from the PDF files.”
The cover sheets republished with concealed data included English, English as an additional language, general mathematics, Chinese language, culture and society, Latin, mathematical methods, music composition, physics and specialist mathematics.
“[Eleven] of these files had been correctly identified by VCAA in the original analysis but were not properly sanitised,” the report says.
The consultants were excluded from looking into the process or tools used to create the cover sheets and the new process used to “clean up” the subsequently uploaded cover pages, and reviewing the analysis carried out by the Education Department and the VCAA.
Of the report’s 33 pages, nine detail the findings while the rest are appendices, according to the freedom of information request.
To date, the breach has cost taxpayers more than $890,000.
The Education Department’s latest annual report showed it paid independent monitor Margaret Crawford $553,000 to oversee the preparation and delivery of this year’s VCE exams as a response to last year’s events.
It also spent $303,000 for the two-part “root-and-branch” independent review into the exam authority. Led by governance expert Yehudi Blacher, it probed the production of the VCE 2024 exams and its culture when it emerged the authority knew there were problems with some of the exam papers a month before they became public.
Blacher found the VCAA was an organisation driven by fear, secrecy and unchecked authority. He made 11 recommendations to address its internal issues, but noted it would take years because the authority was in such a poor state.
One of the recommendations was to maintain an independent monitor for the next 12 months, or “until the minister is satisfied that the VCAA has the systems and processes to undertake its functions effectively”.
The exam fiasco led to the swift resignation of chief executive Kylie Smith and was followed by the sacking of the VCAA board six months later.
A VCAA spokesperson told this masthead the authority immediately implemented the recommendations of the Blacher report, which included ceasing the production of sample cover sheets.
“Additional oversight, sources and quality assurance steps have been put in place to ensure past mistakes will not be repeated,” they said.
Opposition education spokesman Brad Rowswell said the Allan government needed to be truthful about the real cost of the debacle.
“Instead of honesty, Victorian taxpayers are being drip fed information about costs ... and the minister seems content with withholding the full cost and story,” he said.
Rowswell said the government had to assure the public students would never be in the position again.
Minister for Education Ben Carroll was contacted for comment.
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