VCE fails

08-09-2010

Introduction

While it is not a secret anymore that VCE is highly flawed and an unfair system currently in use by Victoria’s secondary education, there appears to be little evidence to support those claims and the evidence (if it can be called so) provided so far, has only appeared in a couple of online forums, letters to the editors and usually from students who “underachieved” (excuse the term) in their final year VCE “studies”. Those students will receive nothing more but a handful of sympathy from their peers, parents or VCE officials, something that doesn’t come in as particularly helpful, and as a further shock they will not be held as credible in their claims, firstly because they “underachieved” and are by majority considered as “less intelligent” and secondly, and more importantly, because students often write about their ordeal in a distressed and enraged state that usually results in invalidating their own valid reasons, or what was there of them that was valid, and effectively turning them into garbage. Such self-perpetuating process of ignorance by both officials and students has continued to hammer down this state’s high school network for more than two decades now, reaching a major peak (or should I say trough) in recent years and resulting in nothing short of educational catastrophe.

There are probably more questions than one could list here without permanent consequences so I won’t mention them all, however I can say for sure that answers have been outnumbered by questions by far. What is the problem? What is the damage caused by the problem? Can the problem be solved? Surely if it’s a problem, there should be someone to receive the blame for the damage already caused? Who will be the whistleblower for all that? Are there any quick-fix solutions for those affected at the moment? Those are only the tip of the iceberg. To deal with such questions one has to have a thorough knowledge of the entire system, rules and regulations and of course some proper evidence to support one’s assertions. Having said that, I am pleased to tell you that I have done extensive research on the topic and I do have a lot of answers, and mind you the evidence to shock you. My credibility is of course out of the question because the evidence is there to speak for itself, along with your own common sense, and as such I would prefer, for the reasons you’ll understand, to remain anonymous.

Students didn't fail the VCE, VCE failed them

What's the problem?

          These days everyone seems to know the answer to this question and yet nobody has ever made any hard effort to get down to details. That's because the answer is complicated and has two parts to it – the obvious, and the not-so obvious. The obvious part that most people who were at some point in time involved with VCE can correctly guess is that VCE is simply flawed based on the fact that a huge number of great students leave high school hugely disappointed. Parents, teachers and others affected can clearly see that something is wrong but have no knowledge or resources to appeal for proper answers and are instead left to accept the only two reasons that the officials have provided, those being that the system is highly competitive and that the number of places at tertiary institutions is limited.

This article will dwell deeply into the less-obvious aspect of the answer to that difficult question. The definition of the term “underachieved” (in VCE) can be summed up as follows: To gain an “ENTER score” smaller than what would be adequate for enrolment into the desired tertiary course. To elaborate on the term “ENTER score” as it is popularly (and incorrectly) known let’s start by what it actually stands for: Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank. First of all, let me strongly emphasize that last word: rank. So well hidden within an acronym that, when pronounced, it yields the word “enter” (so ironically convenient) and is further camouflaged by the fact that its range is from 0 to 99.95. It takes a lot of thinking and interpretation for an average high school student to realize that what “ENTER score” really is, is a ladder that attempts to rank students by their educational “achievement” with respect to all other students in the state. Now, that fact alone is enough to make a reasonable person question how students with different subjects can be ranked on the same ranking ladder. To make that easier to comprehend for the general reader let’s take a look at it from a different comparable perspective: That would be equivalent of letting a man do a 50m sprint alongside a swimming pool in which 10 other swimmers would be freestyling for a gold medal. Now, before you start yelling out the “scaling” word let me assure you that I’ve not forgotten that part.

Scaling in VCE is an attempt by the officials to give those swimmers some chance against the sprinter by letting the sprinter start at say, about 50 meters behind the swimmers and then hoping they would reach the finish line together at roughly the same time. While that does indeed do it some justice there is still that undeniable fact that apples are being compared to bananas and that apples will roll easier than bananas due to their different nature. The two cannot go in the same category of competition! To be a little more precise, scaling in VCE is a process wherein certain ranking scales are adjusted for different subjects in order to make some equality amongst subjects based on their difficulty as observed by performance in those subjects (e.g. General high performance in information technology will result in overall scores for that subject reduced).

Let’s take a look at some technical aspects of ENTER, “study scores” (ranks) and scaling. “Study scores” for a VCE unit used in the calculation of ENTER are in the range of 0 to 50 and they are actually a rank rather than a deserved score. Those unit ranks are derived by taking student’s performance from school-assessed coursework and the two examinations and then comparing the three marks (on student VCE certificates only denoted by a letter code, rather than a numerical mark) to marks of all other students in that unit/subject. Students are then ranked in order of best to worst and their scores are taken as a fraction of 50. So, for instance, if a student had a unit score for IT of 95% (this refers to the actual mark that student achieved as in how many things he/she got right/wrong on all his/her assessments, which is also approximately A+,A+ and A+ on the VCE certificate) and that student happened to be the best student in the unit, then his “study score” would be allocated number 50, ranking that student in the very top and giving him “perfect score”, despite the fact that student did not actually achieve perfect score in terms of his achievements in school. Therefore, it is logically and practically impossible for everyone to achieve that “study score” of 50 and it is inevitable that there will be students with study scores of 10/50 or less. Technically speaking, if most students did great at one particular unit, gaining over 70% for all their exams and coursework, some of those students would still inevitably be placed at the “study score” of less than 10 of 50 (despite getting a grade equivalent to a B or so!). If something like that happened to me I can imagine me quitting my education altogether and thinking of myself as one dumb kid who doesn’t belong to school. That example is one of the first here that illustrates how poorly and ignorantly the VCE system was designed.

To make the matters worse, someone smart that was responsible for the development of such a system decided to save the world from unfairness by introducing “scaling” – a process where they actually increase or decrease the given rank. What they were actually doing was to cover up the fact of a flaw which I described in previous paragraphs. Looking back at the IT scenario where most students achieved high marks and with a large proportion of students gaining say, over 90% overall, they would add and remove “points” from the “study score” as necessary in order to balance out the students to some average medium within the particular unit, and also with respect to other units – something the officials are keeping somewhat of a secret so it was difficult to obtain any more in depth information about what their reference points actually are and how the scaling affects all students individually. They did however provide the “Scaling Report” which students can use to see how their raw “study scores” will be affected, something we’ll look into later on in this article. The end result is that students from the same unit/subject can find their “scaled study scores” to differ from their raw scores by different degrees. For instance, a person who gains raw “study score” of 45 might find his/her “scaled study score” reduced by 4, while another student who gains say raw 35 might find her/his “scaled study score” increased by 1! Any attempt to understand such ridiculousness will be met with some ignorant response such as “please understand that what was done was done to make it fair for everyone and to make sure that nobody is left at a disadvantage”. 

Having considered all that, those study scores are then combined for all of the subjects (units 3&4) and are translated into the infamous “ENTER score”. How this is done is as follows: First all raw study scores are converted to scaled study scores. The compulsory score used in calculation is taken either from English, English Language, ESL (English as a Second Language) or Literature and is followed by three next highest scores from other units, making it a sum of 4 scores, and then adding only 10% of the fifth or sixth best score if available. The resulting sum is known as Aggregate and is then compared to the Aggregate to ENTER table which is also found as part of the Scaling Report and which gives students approximate ENTER “score”. Important to note would also be that the Scaling Report actually contains averages to closest integer.

To take a look at that whole situation from an alerted perspective, we can see that students from subjects such as Art, Philosophy, Literature and others are being directly compared to students from say Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and so on. Let’s take a look now at two subjects in particular which are illustrative examples of how one can effectively cheat the system by manipulating this crucial flaw.

Example 1: History vs. Mathematics

A particular student A may have excellent memory skills and passion for arts and sciences and may excel at subjects such as History or Biology, which require a lot more memory than hardcore analytical and problem solving skills, while the same student may not be very good at Mathematics and may find it difficult to analytically solve problems that don’t require a lot of memorization, such as is the case with mathematics. This student has a little secret and I’ll reveal shortly what it is. Say our student A wanted to be an engineer because engineers have high employment rate and generally have a higher pay rate than historians for instance and he also has a little passion for particular field in engineering that doesn’t require a lot of mathematics or physics. Most engineering courses have ENTER score requirement pretty high, especially at bigger and more popular universities, say from 80 to 90+, and in addition to that they ask you to have completed VCE units 3&4 in Mathematics and Physics and sometimes they require study scores of 20-25. Our student A knows that he can try to get a study score of over 20 for those two units, but he also knows that there is no way to get an enter score of over 80 by basing all his effort on the two units that would be pretty hard for him. So what happens is that student A then picks up a few units which he can excel at, such as History and Biology, in addition to say, Math. Methods, Math. Specialist, Physics and the compulsory English. If this student obtains study scores of 25 for all of the units then his ENTER score would be roughly around 65 – insufficient for entrance. However, since this student excels at History and Biology and he can confidently attain 45 for History and say 40 for Biology and maybe 35 for English, with 20 for Math. Methods, 10 for a harder math subject Specialist Maths and say 25 for Physics. The calculation of an ENTER “score” would then be something like this:

Subject	Raw study score	Scaled study score*
English	35	34
History - Australian	45	45
Biology	40	41
Math. Methods	20	25
Physics	25	27
Specialist Maths.	10	18
Aggregate		151
ENTER		87

Figure 1 – ENTER calculation table for student A. *Calculations based on 2009 Scaling Report (http://www.vtac.edu.au/pdf/scaling_report.pdf) by VTAC.

Well done student A! Welcome to Mechanical Engineering at RMIT! Please note the official course description (from VTAC 2010):

Major studies: Aerodynamics, Air-conditioning, Computer graphics, Computer modelling, Computer-aided design (CAD), Design (product development), Electronics, Engine systems and instruments, Engineering (mechanical), Mechanical engineering management, Mechanics (fluid), Mechanics (solids), Mechatronics, Renewable energy studies, Robotics, Sustainable energy systems, Systems design and development, Thermodynamics

Prerequisites: Units 3 and 4–English (any) and mathematical methods (either).

Selection mode: CY12: ATAR and two-stage process with a middle-band of approximately 20%. NONY12: GPA (see institutional page), form. See Extra requirements for specifics.

Middle-band: A study score of at least 25 in specialist mathematics = an aggregate 1 point higher. A study score of at least 25 in chemistry or physics = a maximum aggregate 1 point higher. Consideration may be given to the SEAS application.

Seriously?! There’s no study score requirement AT ALL for either physics, maths or… anything? Sure they give you an extra aggregate point if you get 25 for Specialist Maths but why bother? You can just beef up some more biology and get an excess of 5 aggregate points, or more…

Not to mention the “major studies” field, lots of history and biology related topics in there! Student A is now fully prepared and ready to embark on an engineering course. And that’s me not being sarcastic. Student A is indeed ready to take on the engineering course! Why? Because the engineering course will start from the basics – like any course at university – and everything can be learned if one just follows the lectures and reading materials.

From figure 1 it can be seen how a student can obtain the necessary ENTER to enter into an engineering course without paying much attention to the actual units that are prerequisites AND relevant for engineering. The flaw of this can be further illustrated by introducing student B.

Example 2: Student B and Natural Sciences

Student B is what I would like to call a true student who really likes engineering and has picked up units such as Specialist Mathematics, Mathematical Methods, Physics, Chemistry, Information Technology and English and has a healthy interest in natural sciences and awareness of the world around him, consequently deciding to study all subjects equally. The result of this can be catastrophic because the student may not be able to obtain marks good enough on all his exams because of the inadequate time to “prepare” properly for all of them (preparation for exams is another interesting topic that I’ll discuss shortly). The student may end up getting 25-30 for all his units and in the interest of knowledge and his natural curiosity sacrifice his study scores, while student A for instance would be able to get into engineering with probably 3 times less invested effort and 3 times less gained knowledge and skills relevant to engineering. The following is the ENTER calculation for student B:

Subject	Raw study score	Scaled study score*
English	30	28
Chemistry	29	34
Math. Methods	27	33
Physics	29	32
Information Tech – S.D.	30	27
Specialist Maths.	24	34
Aggregate		135
ENTER		77

Figure 2 – ENTER calculation table for student B. *Calculations based on 2009 Scaling Report (http://www.vtac.edu.au/pdf/scaling_report.pdf) by VTAC.

We are terribly sorry student B, you are very bright, motivated, inspired and hardworking student but your efforts were simply not good enough for you to deserve a spot in RMIT’s Mechanical Engineering course, we’ve even given you 2 extra aggregate points for doing hard work in physics and maths but this only raised your ENTER score to 79, and we have some really bright and motivated students with awesome backgrounds in Australian History and Biology who took up all the spots with their 85+ scores....

So, just to sum that up, we have student A whose major subjects are history and biology and who doesn’t care much about the rest, going head to head for an engineering spot against student B who studies all hardcore natural sciences that require extensive problem solving and analytical skills. At the end of the race student A emerges as a clear winner and gets the spot, leaving student B to ponder what has befallen upon him. And this is just a “close call” example – there are examples where the score difference is even higher.

Does that sound anywhere near fair or right, in any way? Believe it or not, such scenarios do actually happen and I have personally witnessed them and spoken to students who were in such ordeals. I cannot reveal the names of those students but I can assure you they exist and they are very real and in fact if you go out there yourself and do some research you will pretty quickly come to realize the same. Most students don’t mind telling you in person how it all happened but would not like for their names to show up online.

Before going onto the third example I would like to address one question that arises from the previous example.

Why do some universities make engineering requirements (as an example) so lenient and rely almost solely on the ENTER “score”?

At first that may seem like a real mystery, but in essence it is a sign that universities have some smart people in their administrative departments. The logic can go as follows: If we assume that the VCE educational system and ranking is truly flawed and corrupt (which it is, hence a reasonable assumption), then how do we get the “right” students into the “right” courses? It’s simple, first tell all the students to attain the highest ENTER score that they can possibly get using any means necessary. Then at the end of the whole charade ask everyone what they want to do with their life. Those who want engineering – great, we have 12000 places at this uni and there are 15000 students who applied for engineering at that uni, so pick the top 12000 students when you sort all the 15000 of them by their rank and tell the others to apply for another course (note: numbers are made-up examples).  When students get into their wanted courses they’ll think about whether they like them or not and appropriately change/transfer courses.

Good plan, I thought, but important to realize is that it’s only a band-aid backup procedure for the broken system and also designed to increase university’s revenue as students will still need to repay their debts for those units that won’t even count towards their degrees.

It would be good if everyone did transfer and adjust courses in their first year but that is not the case. It’s probable that more than half of students continue with their courses – particularly engineering, law and medicine – despite the fact that they don’t enjoy them or are for other reasons not suitable/optimal candidates for the workforce. Hey guess what, it’s a free country and people have the right to choose... the only problem with that is that the choice of a choice will only be given to those who get their ENTERs high.

As a further note, most of you do know that medical courses in general have a stricter requirement scheme and specialized entrance tests. This too is a band-aid solution to the VCE problem and it only partially works.

Example 3 –The biggest flaw of them all

If you think that what I’ve mentioned so far was exposing enough then read on and prepare to change your mind. After everything said so far, including incompatible competition and how one can cheat the system by manipulating its flaws and actually take an easy route, or a shortcut if you will, towards a prestigious CSP place at a popular university and the evidence (ENTER calculation tables) to support it, there is indeed one other great flaw which I’d like to mention and this one is more worrying and in fact scary for both students and all of state Victoria.

As an example, we’ll take a particular student C who is somewhat liking natural sciences but not really a great enthusiast and has picked up to do all the same units as student B, except student C decides to prepare for his exams by just picking 3 main units to prepare for and preparing “hard” for them, effectively ignoring the other two which would count only as 10% of the total score (with strong emphasis on compulsory English of course). This is a smart strategy in general, and is probably what I would do if I was to redo my VCE, even though it would still be a sacrifice of the knowledge that one could gain by eliminating 2 units from the study schedule. This half-sacrificial strategy can work properly for some but can have (and does) disastrous effect on most who pick to do it this way. To cut to the chase, all of this in example 3 has to do with exam preparation, or to be more precise; with the forced mechanical exam preparation.

Basically, what is meant by that term forced is that VCE exams are some of the worst-structured exams I have ever seen, and I have inspected high school exams that I have found on the net from high schools in Asia, Europe and America. If you are to succeed at VCE exams you will have to adapt to them, you will have to learn how to solve problems mechanically, you will have to learn all the tricks implemented in those exams which, in my opinion, are based more on the successful recognition of such little tricks and traps than on the actual ability to logically solve problems. That said you will now understand why student C’s only preparation for his chosen 3 (plus English) units will be repetitive attempts at solving past exams and going through commercial “checkpoints”, which also happen to be problems from past exams and problems based on problems from past exams. That kind of preparation requires a lot of time and a lot of work that is nowhere near interesting and what science or any other unit should be like. It is one reason for the mass-stress experienced by year 12 students and the reason for very high rate of failure in life in general by those who roll down that path. It is next to nothing what you will need in real life and university, if you manage to get into one. I am not very familiar with philosophy or languages and other subjects from those areas so I can’t say whether the same applies in those cases, but as for sciences I’m quite sure it is the case and I suspect it would also be the case for a lot of other units.

I have had the opportunity to meet a worrying number of students who could be modeled by student C’s scenario and here is one example. A female student, 19, completed VCE with an ENTER score of roughly 98. She enrolled into University of Melbourne’s science degree with Maths as major. In her first semester of first year she failed 3 out of 4 units and decided to take a break from university. Year later she didn’t feel like going to university at all and ended up at TAFE doing programming diploma, I haven’t heard from her since and I don’t know if she finished. When I interviewed her she indicated that her mode of preparation for exams was the one described in previous paragraph, involving heavy works on the past exams and checkpoints for Math. Methods, Physics, Chemistry and also English. If you can somehow obtain enrolment records and subsequent progress of students at any science course I’m quite confident that you will indeed find hard evidence of a large proportion of students with ENTER >90 to have failed more than two units in their first year. On the other hand, I have interviewed at least two students who were placed at ENTER of around 70-75 but who have spent a lot more time digging deeper into subjects and paying less attention to the forced exam preparation. Those students excelled at university, with one of them completing his degree at the same time as myself and his average mark for all 3 years of study was 87%, which, at university standards, is extremely good.  I could ask his permission for his VCE certificate and university degree transcript to post online and I would probably get it, however a single case wouldn’t be of much use without statistics from at least 100 students from various universities to prove for a significant proportion of such incidences – which I hope will happen one day when someone decides to do something about it.

Such flaw associated with exams, which I’d like to introduce as a term; forced exam, is of great concern for both education and industry, for the obvious reasons: ruined lives and health for students, incorrect mental development, incorrect and virtually useless education, lack of proper preparation for tertiary education, corrupted workforce, mass incompetence at international level and something that I despise of the most – the murder and unjust promotion of science as a dull, uninteresting and repetitive subject.

Can the problem be fixed and are there any quick-fix solutions?

Problem is of hard-crafted nature and it would require significant reconstruction of the entire educational system to solve it – something we are not likely to see any time soon, unfortunately. As for quick-fix solutions – probably not, but I could go as far to suggest the best possible take to give you the best possible chance of avoiding as many problems as possible and getting into the desired course at university.

I have hinted at this earlier and as unfortunate as it sounds (and that’s because it is) the best way for you to approach VCE would be to model yourself as student C. Pick your 3 easiest subjects, making sure you can get the required minimum score for the others (which shouldn’t be too hard), and study them to your liking during year 11 but with only a little freedom in year 12. From year 12 you should start working on past exams and unfortunately train yourself so that you are able to do forced exams at speed and don’t worry if they don’t make sense, are illogical at times and have a lot of traps and tricks, furthermore don’t worry if they sound like nothing you will ever see in real life – all of that is part of the poor design by the VCE exam-writing team of under-skilled professionals whose life seems to have little purpose and/or excitement. Wouldn’t surprise me if they request reimbursement from their employers every year for the anti-depressants they had to purchase.

I say not to worry because your only goal is to get into university. If you manage and try to remember the fun things that you learned by yourself in year 11 and in previous years during which you had more freedom then they will be of great help during your university course. The most useful skills that I brought with me to university would probably be touch typing, programming and ability to understand the underlying causes of physical phenomena (as opposed to brute forcing the problem solving methods). However, year 12 is not meant to teach you anything useful (as far as natural sciences are concerned) but rather to put you through a ridiculous competition process in which you unfortunately have to participate if you want to go to university. Once you eventually enroll into university, you will be surprised to find that everything that you went over during years 10-12 will be gone over during first semester (3 months) and what’s more it will all be explained in 10-times at least better way than what you heard at your high school for the past 2-3 years. Those 3 months will be of great use because everything that you missed on during your forced study in year 12 you will make up for in that first semester. If you don’t believe me you are free to ask other 2^nd and 3^rd year students or graduates.

Some students have also resorted to cheating in VCE and I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them because the system cheats on them; they find it ethical to fight back. I don’t encourage cheating though as there are serious consequences if you are caught. Nevertheless, I have gathered stories of successful cheaters anonymously and am going to publish them in my next article. They will, however, be considered as nothing more but fiction due to the fact that there is no way to verify others’ claims, but are nevertheless fascinating to hear about whether they are true or not. Stay tuned!