June 28, 2024 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education

The Vocational Major (VM) Bait and Switch

The Continuing Story of the GAT Mysteries

The VCAA can release the exam papers and quite detailed information about VCE and VM results in the December of the assessment year. Full details about VCE and VM results are released in January of the next year. For some undeclared reason the GAT test and the test results were as last year released about two weeks before the 2024 GAT.

As in 2022, the only reference to the GAT in the Premier’s congratulations to VCE and VM students in December 2023 was the result that: '93.6 per cent of students met the literacy and numeracy standards in the General Achievement Test.' ^[1]This is the same result as in 2022, and it now seems to be the norm rather than a very pleasant surprise.

What we don't yet know is what percentage exceeded the standards. Last year it was around 10%. That means that more than 80% of the students were given the same reported result for GAT literacy and numeracy.

Given this excellent level of achievement of the GAT standards, it is surprising that the government does not trumpet these results.

We can see how good the VCE results are by comparing them with the Victorian NAPLAN results for 2023. For NAPLAN, between 31 and 34% do not meet 'reasonable but challenging expectations' at Year 9. The change from between 31-34% not meeting the standard in year 9 to 6.4% not meeting the standards in year 12 is remarkable a result to be celebrated. Why is there no celebration?

The % results for the Victorian NAPLAN Year 9 standards are as follows.

There is no elaboration of the NAPLAN standards other than the assertion that they are challenging but reasonable. About 10% of students leave school in Victoria without completing secondary school. Let us assume that this 10% were all in the 31 to 34% who did not meet the standard at Year 9 (and this is not necessarily the case, of course), then the percentage who did not achieve the standards at Year 12 has gone from down some 18% at Year 9 to down to 7% at Year 12. Might this difference of some 10 or 11 % between Year 9 and Year 12 be described as the difference between a reasonable standard and a reasonable but challenging standard?

The tables below show the description of the standards applied in the VCE.

I will leave the numeracy standards to those to whom it may concern.

But do the standards for reading and writing at Year 12 seem to be challenging but reasonable expectations? On the face of it with 90+% achieving the standard at Year 12 it is hard to see the standard as challenging. With 30% or so results below the challenging but reasonable standard for NAPLAN Year 9 do seem to be challenging.

It might seem disingenuous to compare results for NAPLAN Year 9 with the VCE. NAPLAN aims to 'encourage' students, teachers and parents of the whole cohort to further efforts, but the VCE is offered as an official certified level of performance. It can matter if a student is in that small percentage who cannot reach the GAT standard at Year 12. They may need to do the test again as they are able to do until they reach the standard.

Perhaps the stakes involved account for the apparent difference in standards applied at the different levels?

I know of no rationale offered publicly for the introduction of the GAT literacy and numeracy standards, but we can reasonably speculate that the introduction and testing of standards was a response to concern about the literacy and numeracy of VCE graduates, particularly from employers.

 

It is also the case that Victoria was the last state to mandate a literacy and numeracy assessment at Year 12. If the purpose of the VCE GAT literacy and numeracy assessment is to offer information about literacy and numeracy performance to employers and others, then it in fact offers very little information at all. The VCAA would certainly not offer such meaningless results from VCE studies to tertiary institutions and others. And the literacy and numeracy assessments are not reported separately for VCE students, but they are by no means meaningless for VCE students.

(See my blog on the significance and high stakes nature of the new GAT for VCE students. What we need to know from the New GAT Examiners' Report)

The new GAT as an adjunct to the VM could have been a significant way of adding some rigour to the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL), but the published results for the literacy and numeracy assessment show that the 'standards' that could give real currency value to GAT results for VM students is now more or less meaningless.

No one in the educational bureaucracy wants to draw attention to the low standards of GAT literacy and numeracy shown by the very high pass rates, hence no celebration of the outstanding results. But the outcome of this bait and switch is that the VM has offered little more opportunity for those who want a more worthwhile alternative to the VCE than VCAL did.

A meaningful GAT literacy and numeracy assessment could have given potential employers and tertiary institutions a much more rigorous assessment from alternative courses to VCE than did the VCAL. The evident debasement of the reporting of GAT literacy and numeracy assessment means that the VM is only slightly more rigorous than VCAL. There is no reason to think in the future that the VM will be seen as much more rigorous or of greater esteem that the VCAL.

So for the alternative Year 12 pathways it is back to square one.

[1] Class Of 2023 VCE Graduates Have Done Victoria Proud.pdf https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/class-2023-vce-graduates-have-done-victoria-proud