This year’s General Achievement Test (GAT) for Year 12 students will be rescheduled to keep Victorian students, teachers and broader school communities safe from coronavirus.

With ongoing community transmission still occurring in metropolitan Melbourne, the Department of Health’s public health team has recommended the GAT be rescheduled, reducing the risk of a further outbreak with large cohorts of students taking the test together.

As Victorians work to run the current outbreak of the Delta variant to ground, a new date will be determined in the coming days to give schools and students certainty that the rescheduled test will be safe to go ahead.

On the rescheduled date, students who are in quarantine as positive coronavirus cases or Primary Close Contacts, as well as schools deemed exposure sites, will receive an exemption from the GAT. This will not disadvantage students’ results and will be taken into account with the Consideration of Educational Disadvantage process.

In a normal year, individual students are assessed for special consideration on a case-by-case basis – but the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority will again use the CED process to finalise VCE results for each and every student completing one or more VCE or scored VCE VET Unit 3-4 sequence in 2021.

Consistent with the approach in 2020, the process considers a range of data alongside exam results to calculate final VCE results – like the GAT, comparisons of performance across all assessments and schools and other learning data.

The process will also include assessments of the individual impact of coronavirus on each student including school closures, direct impacts on student’ health, ongoing issues with remote learning and mental health challenges.

The Department of Education and Training and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) will support schools in the coming weeks to make appropriate COVIDSafe plans to hold the GAT.