The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority is a statutory authority of the Government of Victoria responsible for the provision of curriculum and assessment programs for students in Victoria, Australia. The VCAA is primarily accountable to the Victorian Minister for Education. It is also responsible to the Minister for Training and Skills and the Minister for Families and Children in relation to sections of Part 2.5 of the Education and Training Reform Act 2006. The mission of the VCAA is to provide high quality curriculum, assessment and reporting that enables individual lifelong learning.
Responsibilities
The VCAA is responsible for the Victorian Early Learning and Development Framework and the Victorian Curriculum. The Victorian Curriculum F–10 sets out a single, coherent and comprehensive set of content descriptions and associated achievement standards to enable teachers to plan, monitor, assess and report on the learning achievement of every student. The Victorian Curriculum F–10 incorporates and reflects much of the Australian Curriculum F–10, but differs in some important respects, most notably the representation of the curriculum as a continuum of learning and the structural design. Victorian Government and Catholic schools are required to use the Victorian Curriculum F–10. Independent schools may use the Victorian Curriculum F–10 as a model and resource for the effective implementation of the Australian Curriculum. At the senior secondary level, the VCAA provides curriculum and assessment for the Victorian Certificate of Education and the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning.
In 2015, VCAA issued 258,472 VCE study scores to 76,320 students. There were 49,460 VCE completions. The VCAA showcases excellence in student work through the VCE Season of Excellence, an annual festival of works created by VCE students in technology, design, multimedia and the cinematic, visual and performing arts. It also recognises student achievement through the VCE Leadership Awards, Plain English Speaking Awards, VCAL Achievement Awards and Margaret Schofield Memorial Scholarships.
International Delivery
The VCAA has taken a leading role in expanding delivery of the Victorian curriculum internationally. The framework to support this includes a northern hemisphere timetable. In 2015-16, more than 1400 students participated in VCAA assessment programs with 25 overseas providers and in 2015, 460 students completed the Victorian Certificate of Education with offshore providers.
The VCAA also administers the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy which provides an indication of the literacy and numeracy skills of students. Students in Victoria undertake the testing in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
Extra-curricular Programs
Plain English Speaking Award
The VCAA administers the Plain English Speaking Award annually. PESA is a public-speaking competition for students aged 15-18 years. It is designed to provide opportunities for students to build self-confidence and extend their skills in oral communication, speech writing and research. In 2017, PESA celebrated its 40th anniversary of the competition.
Controversies
In a Year 12 VCE English examination in 2011, the VCAA instructed over 40,000 students to analyse a supposedly made-up blog that they in fact plagiarised from an opinion piece written by Helen Razer which was published in Melbourne-based newspaper The Age in 2010. Some of the comments written on the original article's webpage were also plagiarised. The VCAA apologised for this error and strengthened its practices to ensure that examination setting panels complied with copyright requirements in future. In 2012, the VCAA caused further controversy when they published a digitally altered depiction of the painting Storming of the Winter Palace by Nikolai Kochergin in a history examination, which formed part of an image analysis question on the Russian Revolution. The altered painting depicted a BattleTech Marauder II robot participating in the storming along with the Bolsheviks in 1917. A VCAA spokesperson stated that the image was sourced from the internet, and that 5.5 percent of students had their scores adjusted due to the robot's presence. VCAA subsequently instituted a policy to ensure that future content would only be obtained from original source websites, rather than aggregator sites. In 2016, a computer error allowed for 2075 students to receive their ATAR score and VCE results five days earlier than they were supposed to be announced. External SMS provider for VCAA and VTAC, Salmat Digital, created an error that allowed for students to receive their results by texting VCAA and requesting their scores to be sent to them on the expected release date. This sparked outrage from parents of students who did not receive their scores, citing that they considered it "unfair". The VCAA and VTAC acted quickly to contact affected students and their schools to reassure them regarding the accidental early results release. The release of the remaining 97.5% of results took place without further issue at the planned time.
