Pixeled Multimedia Teachers Association

Each year the pixeled committee send out an invitation to all teachers of Multimedia to come and celebrate or commiserate the exam. We hold them on the night of the exam and luckily each year the exam has always fallen on either a Friday or the day before the Cup. Either way that means we can all go out late and have a drink and not worry about the next day.


This year we went to a Greek restaurant in Abbotsford whose choice of menu was a banquet or a banquet. No menu was available because all they ever serve is a... banquet! I've never been to a restaurant that has never had a menu before but hey, when in Rome!

Anyway, the point of the dinner is usually to discuss the exam and for most of us it is the first glimpse we have of it. So you'll always find a few laptops at our dinners and people either horrified at the questions or happy that the kids will know enough to at least attempt an answer.

The general consensus this year was that the exam was better than 2004 (that wouldn't be hard) but worse than 2005. The problem once again was the scripting questions. They are simply too hard! We don't have the time to go indepth with scripting so kids only get a superficial knowledge of conditionals, functions etc... I mean I've been teaching this subject for 3 years now and I couldn't answer some of those questions under exam conditions. VCAA seem to forget that these students are 17 years old with 4 to 5 other subjects to contend with. As if they have the time to become fully fledged programmers in half a term. It is really ridiculous and puts to much pressure on teachers. I would have thought the exam panel would have learnt by now that complex scripting questions should be left to IT exams, not multimedia ones. And where was the visual design questions? A whole competency was missed so that they could shove in more scripting questions.

I could moan all day but instead would rather leave on a positive note and hope the exam results will be happy ones for you and your students.