A parent told this masthead that the same mistake was made at Rochedale, with students learning about Augustus for several weeks before switching to Julius Caesar.
“The students felt like they wasted several weeks learning the wrong material,” he said.
Unhappy with the school’s response to the error, and complaining about a lack of transparency, communication and efforts to catch-up students, the parent emailed the Metropolitan South region’s director in August.
The department’s Metropolitan South region education services acting director replied in mid-October, encouraging the parent to discuss the concerns further with the school principal.
The parent said he was shocked to find out this week the mistake had happened again.
“It is concerning that after this error at Rochedale was reported that there was no attempt to ensure that all other schools were teaching the correct subject,” he said.
“That’s a failure at some level within Education Queensland, surely.”
Brisbane State High and Rochedale State High are both part of the Metropolitan South region.
Langbroek described the debacle as “pretty unforgivable”. He said the QCAA had checked with the 172 schools offering ancient history, and found eight schools had taught the incorrect topic.
“They advise me that the topic for ancient history is advised more than 12 months in advance,” he told 4BC Drive.
“We clearly need to have them advised something about their communication to make sure it doesn’t happen. It’s not happened in any other subject though.”
Langbroek said he stressed a decade ago that he did not want the ATAR to be a “high stakes” test.
“If we were having a 100 per cent test tomorrow in ancient history, and you thought that you only had two days to prepare, you’d be feeling pretty stressed and freaked out about it,” he said.
“So thankfully, this is a 25 per cent test, because they’ve already done 75 per cent, and we can easily scale that up towards 100 per cent by adjusting according to how they’ve performed so far.”
Earlier, QCAA acting chief executive officer Claude Jones said schools were notified of the topic for the ancient history external exam more than 12 months in advance.
