Students who have to miss an exam will receive a derived score, based on their results in other school-based assessments they have completed this year and their performance in the General Achievement Test.
But Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority chief executive Stephen Gniel said the authority wanted as many students as possible to be able to sit their exams rather than spend their last days of school in enforced isolation.
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“Students have worked really hard, so we want them to have the opportunity to sit the exam,” he said.
Among the schools to have suffered a case since students returned is Northcote High in Melbourne’s north, where VCE students were told to isolate on Monday and Tuesday and to learn from home after a COVID-positive student attended for two days last week.
Josie Armstrong, a year 12 student at Northcote High, said she feared the prospect of having to miss her exams.
“I’d be quite stressed if I was stuck in isolation and had to rely on past results if I’d studied for a few weeks leading up to it, and then suddenly you can’t do it [an exam],” Josie, 18, said.
Josie, who wants to study media at RMIT University, said she was already nervous that the unplanned return to remote learning this week would affect her ATAR.
All VCE students will receive individual consideration of the educational disadvantage they experienced due to COVID-19 this year.
Al-Taqwa principal Omar Hallak wrote to the school community this week, saying he held grave concerns that a return to face-to-face classes would trigger another outbreak at the school, given its students come from a wide catchment in the western and northern suburbs, where COVID-19 is still raging.
He wrote: “The college’s view is that despite every precaution we can take, and how closely we comply with the Victorian government’s rules and requirements, it is inevitable that, with our catchment area being by far the worst-affected COVID hot zones, the college will be affected severely by numerous COVID-19 infections as the scheduled return to face-to-face teaching and learning continues.”
A spokeswoman for Kilvington Grammar said the school would move to a hybrid teaching mode for senior students for the rest of the school year, with in-class and in-home teaching on offer.
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Push to cut isolation time for vaccinated students as exams loom
Source: Philippines Alive
