[vet-mm] EXAM Revision

[claire]

whew, where did those holidays go?? It's not long now...

Firstly can I just thank all the teachers who attended the PixelEd exam 
revision lecture yesterday and/or facilitated their students attending. 
Once again, Graeme encapsulated everything that most of us tell our 
kids, but with the added authority of being past Chief Examiner.

A couple of questions came up yesterday and I just want to share with all:
1) the student exam instructions for 2009 are available at 
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vcaa/vce/exams/examcovers/Oct_Nov_2009/2009vetmm-cov.pdf
It's well worth going thru these with your kids. As mentioned yesterday, 
during reading time, students cannot write notes or run up any programs. 
However, they should bring pen/pencil as paper is supplied should they 
want to jot anything down once working time starts.

2) Your VCE coordinator and computer technician will have the 
installation instructions and details.
MS Office and in particular, WORD, cannot be loaded. Any writing that 
might need to be done is using notepad or simple text editor.

3) I'm no authority on this but as far as I understand the process, your 
techie makes a computer image consisting of the allowed programs, which 
is very carefully tested beforehand to ensure all programs run correctly.
On exam day, this image and the exam is deployed to each C drive, under 
the exam supervisors instructions.
As the teacher, I am in no way involved in this process.
All computers are then taken completely off  the network for the 
duration of the exam. When the exam is finished, the techie can connect 
back to the network to gather the exams off each C drive...techie needs 
to carefully ensure all responses have been gathered before re-imaging 
machines back to normal!

During the exam, if there are problems with individual computers, then 
techie may reboot and try again and/or move student to a spare computer. 
The student will get any additional time that this process takes but if 
they have not been saved prac work, this work and time would be lost. So 
remind your kids to save prac regularly and to the right location - as 
per the exam instructions.

If there is a major disaster and all the computers go down, I believe 
there is an ultimate fall back of a paper-based exam but don't know if 
this has ever been used. Basically, it won't be your problem and there 
is nothing you can do, it's up to the exam supervisors, school admin and 
VCAA to sort out any hassles, so try not to worry too much!!!

4) In case your students attended the lecture, there was a bit of 
confusion over a couple of the multi choice questions ie 2006-q1, the 
answer is C -use a gif to put a limited colour, simple line drawing logo 
on a web page and in 2004 q 1 the answer is C kerning is adjusting the 
space between individual letters.

5) Encourage students with A or A+ SACs to enter Top Designs 
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/excellenceawards/seasonofexcellence/index.html

Happy revision everyone!!
Claire Bloom
Warrandyte High
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