The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) 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 directly responsible to the Victorian Minister for Education through the VCAA Board.
At the senior secondary level, the VCAA provides curriculum and assessment for the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) and the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL).
At the Prep to Year 10 level, the VCAA provides curriculum for the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) and formerly administered the Achievement Improvement Monitor (AIM) program (now replaced by the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN)) 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.
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.
Famous quotes containing the words victorian, curriculum, assessment and/or authority:
“I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism, and can look back to an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud on whose horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“The first year was critical to my assessment of myself as a person. It forced me to realize that, like being married, having children is not an end in itself. You don’t at last arrive at being a parent and suddenly feel satisfied and joyful. It is a constantly reopening adventure.”
—Anonymous Mother. From the Boston Women’s Health Book Collection. Quoted in The Joys of Having a Child, by Bill and Gloria Adler (1993)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)